Can eating a €1 gummy bear made with CANNABIS OIL really boost your health?
EARLIER this month, Dee Mani, a mother of two, claimed she’d cured her aggressive breast cancer by taking a drop of cannabis oil a day.
Dee had refused chemotherapy as it had failed to keep her sister alive a few years earlier when she had the disease.
After being diagnosed in March 2017, Dee, 44, read online about the reported benefits of the oil and began putting a single drop on her tongue every evening. Five months later, scans showed her cancer had gone.
Over the years, more stories such as Dee’s have emerged, with claims not only that cannabis oil can ‘cure’ cancer, but that it can successfully treat a host of other serious problems where conventional medicine has failed.
Its proponents point to research that shows it can help with nerve pain, for instance. Anecdotal evidence suggests it may also prevent seizures caused by some forms of epilepsy.
And recently cannabis oil, or specifically, a chemical found in cannabis plants called cannabidiol (CBD), was given a clean bill of health by none other than the World Health Organisation.
In a report published in December, its Expert Committee on Drug Dependence said it found cannabidiol had several possible major medical applications and no adverse health outcomes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, CBD products have become increasingly popular.
Recently Holland & Barrett reported that sales of one remedy, Jacob Hooy CBD+Oil have risen by 37% since it started stocking it in January.
However, CBD products, which include digestible gel capsules, vaping liquid to be inhaled with an e-cigarette, lip balm and even gummy bear sweets, are not cheap. Prices range from €11.99 for a 10ml bottle (240 drops) from Holland & Barrett to €455 for a 100ml bottle from some online suppliers: even the gummy bear sweets cost €1 each.
AGAINST this are the question marks over just how effective CBD actually is. For instance, a 2016 study published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, carried out at the North-West University in South Africa, showed CBD slowed the rate at which cervical cancer cells grew in the laboratory or, in some cases, even killed them off.
But these findings have not yet been replicated in humans.
And this month, guidelines issued to 30,000 doctors in Canada highlighted that in the few conditions where cannabis has been shown to be helpful (such as for nerve pain and muscle spasticity in multiple sclerosis) the impact is only marginal, but there was plenty of evidence of side-effects.
‘We recommend against the use of cannabinoids for most conditions owing to lack of evidence of benefits and known harms,’ the document from the University of Alberta said.
When people talk about using cannabis as a medical treatment, usually it is in the form of drops of oil, taken daily, made from the stalks and leaves of cannabis plants. The oil is said to ease pain, reduce the nausea of chemotherapy and relieve muscle spasms, among other things.
There are two types of oil — cannabis oil made from marijuana and containing THC, the psychoactive element of cannabis that causes a high. This form is illegal. The ‘legal’ CBD you can purchase on the High Street is derived from hemp, which comes from the same plant as marijuana, but is cultivated differently.
As a result, it has very much lower levels of THC — less than 0.2% compared with 50% to 80% in marijuana.
Cannabis is illegal in Ireland for recreational use. For medical use, it is possible for doctors to be granted special dispensation to give the stronger THC — tetrahydrocannabinol — products to their patients, approved on a caseby-case basis by the Minister for Health Simon Harris.
The move last November marked a change in regulation to allow patients with chronic pain to use products containing the stronger THC compound but only when approved by the department. Plus anyone given the dispensation must not smoke the product but use in a vape or as a tea.
However, products containing just CBD (and not the stronger THC — tetrahydrocannabinol) are technically legal here, as they don’t fall under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The question is, will the legal CBD you can get on the High Street be potent enough to make a difference? The simple answer is no, say some experts.
They say research shows that for CBD to have any beneficial effect, it must be given in much larger quantities than found in High Street products.
This is because CBD is poorly absorbed by the body as it can easily be broken down by enzymes produced in the gut and the liver.
Consequently, only a fraction of the CBD ingested reaches the bloodstream. ‘Only about 6% of what is taken gets absorbed,’ says Dr Amir Englund, a researcher in psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. ‘That’s why, in trials, we have to use very large doses.’
He was involved in a study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry last December, which showed that giving a daily dose of CBD oil to mentally ill patients significantly reduced the level of psychotic symptoms such as paranoia and hallucinations.
They gave 88 patients either CBD or a dummy drug for six weeks and found a significant reduction in psychosis, with hardly any side-effects. But the dose needed was 1,000mg of (100%) CBD oil, twice daily.
Most online oils, gels or sweets provide no more than a couple of hundred milligrams at most: Jacob Hooy CBD+Oil 240 drops bottle contains just 2.75% CBD.
Online suppliers, such as CBD Oils UK, which produces a product range called Love Hemp, have oils containing as much as 40% CBD. ‘The daily dose of CBD from these would be very low and there are no studies to support the idea that it would have any beneficial effects,’ says Dr Englund.
CBD products are sold as food supplements and suppliers are careful not to make medical claims. For example, one online supplier, called For The Ageless, says its products ‘support wellbeing and optimum health’. Another online supplier, Canabidol, states on the opening page of its website: ‘Maintain your health with cannabis.’
Scientists who have spent years investigating the drug’s potential medicinal powers say there is good evidence that CBD could indeed be the basis for powerful new medicines for a range of conditions.
But there is no evidence yet that placing a few drops of oil on the tongue every day, chewing a sweet made with CBD or rubbing on a lip balm will prevent ill health or combat common ailments.
‘CBD has great potential and there are many studies under way looking at its possible future uses,’ says academic and addictions expert, Dr Tom Freeman, who has been investigating CBD for the past decade.
‘But none of these products on sale has been through clinical trials and people should definitely not be using them as though they are a medicine. I would recommend that people using these products seek advice from their GP for any decisions related to their treatment.’
In fact, there are already legitimate and licensed cannabis-based medicines available.
Drugs firm GW Pharmaceuticals makes Sativex, a peppermint-flavoured mouth spray for multiple sclerosis, using CBD and tiny amounts of psychoactive THC to ease painful muscle spasms.
GW Pharmaceuticals has also developed a CBD-based drug for certain hard-to-treat forms of epilepsy. The drug, called Epidiolex, is awaiting approval from the US Food and Drug Administration following successful trials.
IT is 98% CBD, more than double the highest content oil sold online.
The University of Oxford recently set up a €11.3million drugs research business, called Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies, to investigate CBD’s potential to illnesses like arthritis, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression and Parkinson’s disease.
This research could take several years to come to any conclusions. In the meantime, deregulation of cannabis for medical use in US states California, Colorado and Oregon, is fuelling demand.
Dr Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in mental health, fears the hype around CBD may put some patients at risk — especially if anxious parents of children with epilepsy decide to abandon prescription medicines in favour of what they perceive as a more ‘natural’ treatment.
‘People who buy these CBD products are potentially wasting their money,’ he says. ‘And parents should never stop a child’s anti-epileptic medication without going to see their GP first.’
Dr Jeremy Howick, a researcher who specialises in the placebo effect, adds that any health-boosting benefits that cannabis oil devotees experience are probably all in the mind. ‘They are unlikely to help other than through a placebo mechanism,’ he says.