HempTalk - Business Blogs and Press Releases

In recent years, psilocybin and MDMA have been explored as potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, but somewhat more quietly so has cannabis. In fact, according to a few quick searches of PubMed, cannabis has a longer and richer association with PTSD in the scientific literature than any psychedelic. Though you wouldn’t know that by reading the headlines.

Setting aside for a minute how effective psychedelics may or may not be as breakthrough treatments for PTSD, there’s no doubt that cannabis is still much easier for most patients to access.

Recent research – including three new studies (from three different countries) – suggests that growing numbers of PTSD sufferers are medicating with cannabis, and truly finding it helpful.

Depression Drives Cannabis Use

First, a paper in the journal BMC Psychiatry1 from researchers based in Ontario, Canada, provides some insight into cannabis use among PTSD patients during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Between April 3 and June 24 of 2020, 462 individuals with self-reported PTSD completed an online questionnaire that assessed mental health symptoms and cannabis intake both before the pandemic and in the seven days prior to filling out the survey.

Stress, anxiety, and depression worsened across the board, but by categorizing participants according to cannabis use patterns – not using, using less, using the same, or using more – the researchers discovered something interesting. PTSD sufferers who increased their cannabis use during the pandemic were more likely to also experience “meaningful perceived worsening of depression symptoms,” the authors write.

Project CBD is an independent media platform with 100,000-plus subscribers. Our educational website is visited regularly by people from more than 150 countries. We’re proud to say that we’re not backed by billion-dollar multistate operators, whose bottom line depends on stiffing labor unions and engaging in phony equity scams. We don’t make money by advertising products infused with sketchy “hemp-derived” intoxicants like delta-8, delta-10, HHC, THC-O, and other unregulated synthetic compounds. We don’t promote pay-to-play lists of “the best CBD products for (name-your disease)” that have little to do with efficacy and everything to do with which company has the deepest pockets.

At Project CBD, we favor regenerative farmers over pesticide polluters, artisanal craft mom-and-pops over bland potency cookie-cutters. We like our CBD fresh from the garden rather than synthesized in a lab – and that’s not just an aesthetic preference, as we recently warned in a special report about the dangers of non-natural “chiral” versions of lab-created CBD isolate.

We fight against the stigmatization of cannabis, as well as the snake-oil promoters that mislead consumers.

At Project CBD, we fight against the stigmatization of cannabis, as well as the snake-oil promoters that mislead consumers. When Fox News dredges up boogeyman claims that marijuana smoking causes gun violence, we counter with peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating the link between cannabis use and prosocial behavior. And when we see CBD and cannabis brands touting their products as “sleep aids” because they include CBN (cannabinol), we feel it’s our responsibility to let our readers know there’s actually no scientific basis for marketing claims that CBN has soporific properties.

At Project CBD, we understand not everyone is in a position to pay to access our content. That’s why we make our web content and weekly newsletter available free of charge. But if you are able, we really need your help.

CBD has exploded in popularity over the past decade.

Ethan Nadelmann talks about the power and promise of this cannabinoid with one of the world’s leading experts on the subject: Martin A. Lee, author of two highly acclaimed books, Acid Dreams and Smoke Signals, and cofounder and director of ProjectCBD.org. The two cover various topics including what is CBD and how does it work, what is its relationship to THC and what’s the evidence for its medical and health benefits, what role is the FDA playing in regulating hemp and what’s going on outside the United States?

Listen on Spotify

The post CBD: It’s a Molecule, Not a Miracle appeared first on Project CBD.