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The Untapped Potential of Medical CBD
Recreational CBD is booming, but what’s the holdup with its medical uses?
“To imagine that a small amount of oil from a plant could prevent terrible seizures was so hard to comprehend,” says Chelsea Leyland, a British DJ, activist, and epilepsy sufferer. She’s describing the first time her family saw a video of Charlotte Figi, a toddler from Colorado whose family was able to reduce her violent seizures from 120 a day to nearly zero with a CBD-THC tincture derived from cannabis.
Three years ago, Leyland was taking lamotrigine and Keppra, two heavy pharmaceuticals with severe side effects, to prevent myoclonic seizures. Eventually, after some anecdotal advice, she bought a bottle of CBD oil and added it to her daily pharmaceutical regimen. “The effects were pretty instant and quite dramatic in how I felt day to day. I felt I had introduced medicine that was more effective than the medicine I had been prescribed,” she says. Leyland independently weaned herself off the pharmaceutical drugs over a six-month period while continuing to take CBD daily and says she hasn’t had a single seizure since.
Cannabidiol is one of many compounds in the cannabis plant and accounts for up to 40% of the plant’s chemical makeup. Cannabis is now legal for medicinal use in 33 U.S. states and for recreational use in 11. Legal changes in recent years have opened the doors to dozens of new recreational products, including CBD-infused bath bombs, candles, chocolate, coffee, dog treats, and sex lube. The market will reach $41 billion by 2025, Nielsen predicts, and mainstream brands like Coca-Cola and Ben & Jerry’s are reportedly exploring new CBD brands.
The mode of action for most psychoactive plants is straightforward: Coca leaves contain benzoylmethylecgonine, which boosts levels of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, in turn elevating mood. Poppy plants ooze with morphine, which delivers the greatest dose of pain relief found on earth. But cannabis is far more complex: CBD is just one of 120 phytocannabinoids, and it alone interacts with several different receptors on the surface of human cells, which in turn influence the effects of other native neurotransmitters and foreign drugs. Untangling these different psychoactive compounds — and their interactions…
