Wonder Drug

CBD via gummy bears

   
        "Peter, I have been reading about this CBD stuff. Can you get me some of those CBD gummy bears to try?"

             Bob, a 91 year old friend, with back aches.

     "This edible contains CBD. Perfect for preparing for life's adventures. It's a little like a spa treatment for your body and soul. Enjoy"

                  CBD package note

CBD is short for cannabidiol, one of the hundred-plus substances found in the cannabis plant. It does not get a person "high." It is medicine. Maybe it works.

The industry is consolidating. There is money up for grabs.

CBD is thought to treat a variety of medical issues, including pain, anxiety, insomnia, nausea, epilepsy, cognition, schizophrenia, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and the side affects of cancer treatment.

CLICK: Article on Big Pharma takeover

The CBD packages I examined all have some assertion of their health affect and then "These statement have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

For now CBD is being treated as a probably-harmless dietary supplement. One sees similar explanations on the sides of bottle at health food stores. 

The potential of CBD being very, very big business has transformed the landscape of Southern Oregon, where farmers are growing 8,000-plus acres of it this year. Growers are trying to meet the market for CBD. Southern Oregon had a head start growing this plant through its early experience with the THC (get you high) variety of the plant, and the laws in 

Oregon were set up to accommodate CBD grows. The market advantage for this year is that it can be done at scale, legally, in Oregon, but soon other states will come on like as competitors. Growers are rushing to take advantage of that head start.

CBD via vape pen

 There is never any money other than the cost of production once something becomes an agricultural commodity. There may be some potential for branding CBD from this region as Southern Oregon hemp, not just any hemp. Local growers say this is an especially good place to grow the cannabis plant. 

The CBD packages claim a health effect, good for you in a variety of ways, but then "These statement have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

CBD is going mainstream. The giant names in pharmaceuticals are entering the market, developing relationships with growers and laboratories, and sponsoring clinical trials. Big pharmaceutical companies have a priceless asset they can bring to the CBD industry: Brand credibility. 

The consumer has questions: Is the CBD product the real thing? Is the strength or dose consistent? Is it pure and unadulterated? Is it the same thing one bought previously? Will it really work? 

Something branded by Johnson and Johnson or Pfizer has more credibility than a package I bought recently from "Sun God Medicinals," produced near an auto wrecking yard on a street I travel daily. "Home-made" and “local” gives value in some arenas--grocery produce--but not in drugs one ingests. There, one seeks the imprimatur of imagined laboratories and years of quality control procedures, and a brand with a reputation to uphold.

CBD via eyedropper

Currently, a consumer enters a store and a counter person shows a customer an array of literally hundreds of products from scores of producers. CBD can be smoked as flower buds, ingested as drops of oil from an eye dropper, inhaled from a vape pen, or eaten as a hard candy, a chewy sweet, inside chocolate, or drunk. Then there are scores of producers within each of those categories, each with their own brand.

It is a free for all of choices. That creates the opportunity for the big brand name drug companies.

Pain relief is a significant sales category for drug companies. If CBD really works for pain relief, then it could invade and poach that business. If CBD takes business from Johnson and Johnson's Tylenol, then they want to own the new product, too. They have a head start in credibility in pain relief.

Big pharma is sponsoring tests. They are buying up patents. They are turning a free for all into an oligopoly. 

There are problems to overcome. Edible CBC is fat soluble, not water soluble. It is absorbed slowly and in different ways by different people. And governments approach cannabis from a control and tax orientation, rather than a therapeutic benefit orientation. CLICK: Edible Cannabis problems

Going mainstream is a mixed blessing for the local hemp-growing industry. In the short run, this means credibility for the product, and via the industry's clout in Congress. The drug industry invests hundreds of millions of dollars every year in Congress. Drug companies have friends in high places. 

For example, Greg Walden, now Ranking 
Member of the Committee overseeing the drug industry, is a good, loyal friend of the industry, protecting and advancing its interests. CBD will need that congressional support to go mainstream. If testing proves out that CBD is safe and effective at treating some things, its use will expand enormously. It might be sold over the counter right next to Advil and Tylenol.

In the long run, it is troubling. If CBD actually works, and goes mainstream,  it becomes marketed inside familiar food products (like Diet Pepsi-with-CBD or Oreos-with-CBD) or as a branded pain reliever. At that point any hopes of special treatment for local Southern Oregon provenance are lost. CBD would be sold entirely as a chemical, pure and ultra distilled, not as a farm product with whatever local characteristics might be special to local latitude, sun, water, and soil.

Then it is all about cost of production, and every bit of margin will be squeezed out. It will be a commodity. Local hemp will compete with ten-thousand acre farms in California's Central Valley.

The gold rush will be over. Hemp land locally will go back to alfalfa. Farmers will have day jobs in town to support themselves.