6 ms·

(My opinion) I'm generally against any form of regulation, but as long as we live in a society where drug laws already don't make sense, regulating the headsho

(My opinion) I'm generally against any form of regulation, but as long as we live in a society where drug laws already don't make sense, regulating the headshop CBD industry is going to do good things. The industry around cannabidiol is disgusting, particularly when it comes to products sold outside of states with medical or recreational marijuana. Outside of your average stoner looking for holistic medicine, a great deal of people interested in CBD are cancer patients or family of cancer patients. At best, these companies are making money selling snake oil to dying people. At worst, they're introducing dangerous toxic chemicals to immunocompromised individuals and actively harming them. I can't find the article but there was news a few years ago about a head chemist stepping down from one of the largest (at the time) legal producers of CBD. She wrote an exposé about how their leadership was pushing for higher purity at the cost of safety, and how it forced her to resign.

howhireable3141 8y ago
Agreed but the government is to blame for a lot of this. People are super thirsty for CBD, it is very effective for many people. Especially elderly people that have been anti-pot most of their lives. These people don't have any good ways of making good buying decisions, let a lone having a regulatory body to rely on to test this stuff. So they just choose stuff with good marketing and high concentrations. Not to say your article isn't making a good point -- just that these nasty companies being successful is due to a vacuum created by decades of complete head-up-our-own-ass marijuana policy.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >People are super thirsty for CBD, Because you can't open social media without seeing music artists, actors, comedians, strength athletes, social-media-only-famous people shilling for one company or another with sponsored posts. >it is very effective for many people. Placebo is a hell of a drug. There is no credible, replicable, evidence that CBD does anything for anyone, and it's done nothing for many people duped into buying it, it's likely acting as a placebo. It's all n=1 posts, "my friend's uncle has cancer and took some and man it changed his life", SEO advertorial blogs and 'press releases', forum posts etc.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    To what extent has it been properly studied? If you're asserting it's a placebo effect, shouldn't that mean you have significant proof no other effect is involved? I haven't tried it, but I have friends with chronic pain that prefer it to both opiates and OTC painkillers and have for years. That certainly could be placebo, but having seen them cycle through a variety of approaches and stop on CBD, I'd be surprised there's absolutely no effect.
    - pr0zac 8y ago
      > If you're asserting it's a placebo effect, shouldn't that mean you have significant proof no other effect is involved? Thats not how scientific research into drugs works. The null hypothesis that you hold by default is that the substance being studied has no effect. The purpose of research is to demonstrate that an effect exists and until that has been shown the null hypothesis is held to be true. https://info.umkc.edu/drbanderson/null-hypothesis-testing/ https://info.umkc.edu/drbanderson/null-hypothesis-testing/
      - wpietri 8y ago
        Perhaps you could try assuming that I knew about the null hypothesis already and still wrote what I wrote.
  - codeulike 8y ago
    There is no credible, replicable, evidence that CBD does anything for anyone There are studies that show it is reasonably effective for some intractable forms of epilepsy https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1611618 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1611618 Indeed there is an official licensed medicinal version called Epidolex and the FDA recently approved it https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm611046.htm https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/u... (however this often gets overblown somewhat by the pot lobby, so I share your concerns about snake oil in general)
    - prepend 8y ago
- dd36 8y ago
  There’s no regulatory body testing most things, especially chemicals. It’s tragic.
  - RA_Fisher 8y ago
    I find the premise that consumers need ahead-of-time protection insulting and limiting. If wrongs are made, we have a system for remedy: tort. The FDA is an adjacent regulatory body. Through its risk adverse behavior, the FDA causes unseen deaths: https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-policies-kill https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-poli... Also, the FDA performs poor data collection and sharing. When I analyzed one of the FDA'S most important datasets, I was surprised to find such low quality: https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/master/drug_analysis.R https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/... What's tragic to me is that so often folks feel safety or wealth comes from the government rather than our own minds. Maybe if there's no safety facade they'll demand private labs certify safety?
    - pboutros 8y ago
      What do you think about Thalidomide then? http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/controversies/thalidomide http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/them...
      - RA_Fisher 8y ago
        A back pat for a function the market would have provided immediately. Drugs can definitely be poison. I'd much prefer safety analyses have a GitHub sha1 publicly accessible than secretively behind the FDA's closed doors.
        bunderbunder 8y ago
        > a function the market would have provided immediately. This opinion would seem to be at odds with reality at large. The reason the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act was passed in the first place is because of all the harm that the (then unregulated) pharmaceutical industry was doing. The market had centuries' worth of time to correct for people taking all sorts of drugs that actively kill people, and it didn't. It was only regulation that started to get the mess under control. And it's the loopholes in regulation where things are worst. The supplement industry continues to do far more harm than good. It's just possible that, despite the best efforts of some economists to argue that everyone is perfectly knowledgeable, rational, and emotionless in order to simplify their models, people continue to be merely human.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  Most of the claims about CBD are, to put it mildly, bogus. This is why the FDA is stepping in.
ryanmercer 8y ago
>regulating the headshop CBD industry is going to do good things. Meh, this just gives people something to manipulate to try and give their snake oil validity "hey the FDA says it's ok!". There's no credible, replicable, evidence CBD does anything beneficial besides acting as a placebo. Just lots of ad copy, 'press releases', SEO link farms, n=1 claims and content claiming the benefits posted directly, or through a layer or two of obfuscation, by manufacturers.
- burgerboy 8y ago
  Got any data to back that up
- toaster42 8y ago
  You are being amazingly toxic without contributing meaningfully to this conversation, ryanmercer.
dd36 8y ago
Nearly all regulation is to protect the public from something bad that someone did in the past. Why would you be against that?
- donkeyd 8y ago
  Because seatbelts, airbags, building codes and things like that are just a huge burden on society.
  - _Schizotypy 8y ago
    /s Here you dropped this
- pc86 8y ago
  There is the ideological argument that a lot of regulation comes out of Congress ceding its lawmaking authority to un-elected and largely unaccountable Executive branch officials. So it's not necessarily a desire that the regulation not exist, but that it come out of Congress so there are faces and names attached to it. And while some regulation is certainly a response to bad actors to say that "nearly all" of the tens of thousands of new pages of regulations written every year are that is going to need some sort of citation.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Being "generally against regulation" doesn't imply any specific mitigating rational as you would suggest. Being against poor, mishandled, or unnecessary regulation... yes. But if that was stated, there'd be nothing to argue with.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Ideologically you can be "generally against regulation" because you think it's unnecessary, or because you think more optimal positions will come out of the free market, or because you think corporations having free reign to do whatever they want is not an inherently negative thing. Some of those seems more reasonable than others, of course.
jklinger410 8y ago
>At best, these companies are making money selling snake oil to dying people. At worst, they're introducing dangerous toxic chemicals to immunocompromised individuals and actively harming them. This statement would make a lot more sense if our government did not currently have ignorant and draconian regulations and restrictions around this substance. The snake oil salesman knows it does nothing and sells it anyway. Snake oil is not banned from being studied. CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures. You have an opinion that someone with a PHD needs to sign off on everything you put in your body, that's fine. But that does not equate things that are untested to fucking snake oil, my guy.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  > CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures. there is a huge issue with quality control for cbd -- it varies wildly between products and is totally impossible to control for. i'm sure it can be medically useful but you must be able to buy a legitimate product first.
  - jklinger410 8y ago
    Ok, cool. I totally agree. I'm just not sure how "it's good that CBD is regulated" is similar to "every company that makes CBD is selling snake oil or putting people's lives in danger."
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  See, this is where "snake oil" claims give us problems - in trying to knock down criticisms of the industry, you're making a false claim. > There is no placebo effect for seizures. "A positive response to placebo administration, manifesting as a decrease in seizure frequency, can be observed in epileptic dogs." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19912522 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19912522 "For unknown reasons, placebos reduce seizures in clinical trials in many patients... Strangely, a meta-analysis found placebo effects in epilepsy trials increased steadily from 1989 to 2010, with decreasing apparent drug treatment effects." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546516/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546516/

howhireable3141 8y ago

Agreed but the government is to blame for a lot of this. People are super thirsty for CBD, it is very effective for many people. Especially elderly people that have been anti-pot most of their lives. These people don't have any good ways of making good buying decisions, let a lone having a regulatory body to rely on to test this stuff. So they just choose stuff with good marketing and high concentrations. Not to say your article isn't making a good point -- just that these nasty companies being successful is due to a vacuum created by decades of complete head-up-our-own-ass marijuana policy.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>People are super thirsty for CBD, Because you can't open social media without seeing music artists, actors, comedians, strength athletes, social-media-only-famous people shilling for one company or another with sponsored posts. >it is very effective for many people. Placebo is a hell of a drug. There is no credible, replicable, evidence that CBD does anything for anyone, and it's done nothing for many people duped into buying it, it's likely acting as a placebo. It's all n=1 posts, "my friend's uncle has cancer and took some and man it changed his life", SEO advertorial blogs and 'press releases', forum posts etc.
- wpietri 8y ago
  To what extent has it been properly studied? If you're asserting it's a placebo effect, shouldn't that mean you have significant proof no other effect is involved? I haven't tried it, but I have friends with chronic pain that prefer it to both opiates and OTC painkillers and have for years. That certainly could be placebo, but having seen them cycle through a variety of approaches and stop on CBD, I'd be surprised there's absolutely no effect.
  - pr0zac 8y ago
    > If you're asserting it's a placebo effect, shouldn't that mean you have significant proof no other effect is involved? Thats not how scientific research into drugs works. The null hypothesis that you hold by default is that the substance being studied has no effect. The purpose of research is to demonstrate that an effect exists and until that has been shown the null hypothesis is held to be true. https://info.umkc.edu/drbanderson/null-hypothesis-testing/ https://info.umkc.edu/drbanderson/null-hypothesis-testing/
    - wpietri 8y ago
      Perhaps you could try assuming that I knew about the null hypothesis already and still wrote what I wrote.
- codeulike 8y ago
  There is no credible, replicable, evidence that CBD does anything for anyone There are studies that show it is reasonably effective for some intractable forms of epilepsy https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1611618 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1611618 Indeed there is an official licensed medicinal version called Epidolex and the FDA recently approved it https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm611046.htm https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/u... (however this often gets overblown somewhat by the pot lobby, so I share your concerns about snake oil in general)
  - prepend 8y ago
dd36 8y ago
There’s no regulatory body testing most things, especially chemicals. It’s tragic.
- RA_Fisher 8y ago
  I find the premise that consumers need ahead-of-time protection insulting and limiting. If wrongs are made, we have a system for remedy: tort. The FDA is an adjacent regulatory body. Through its risk adverse behavior, the FDA causes unseen deaths: https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-policies-kill https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-poli... Also, the FDA performs poor data collection and sharing. When I analyzed one of the FDA'S most important datasets, I was surprised to find such low quality: https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/master/drug_analysis.R https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/... What's tragic to me is that so often folks feel safety or wealth comes from the government rather than our own minds. Maybe if there's no safety facade they'll demand private labs certify safety?
  - pboutros 8y ago
    What do you think about Thalidomide then? http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/controversies/thalidomide http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/them...
    - RA_Fisher 8y ago
      A back pat for a function the market would have provided immediately. Drugs can definitely be poison. I'd much prefer safety analyses have a GitHub sha1 publicly accessible than secretively behind the FDA's closed doors.
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        > a function the market would have provided immediately. This opinion would seem to be at odds with reality at large. The reason the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act was passed in the first place is because of all the harm that the (then unregulated) pharmaceutical industry was doing. The market had centuries' worth of time to correct for people taking all sorts of drugs that actively kill people, and it didn't. It was only regulation that started to get the mess under control. And it's the loopholes in regulation where things are worst. The supplement industry continues to do far more harm than good. It's just possible that, despite the best efforts of some economists to argue that everyone is perfectly knowledgeable, rational, and emotionless in order to simplify their models, people continue to be merely human.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Most of the claims about CBD are, to put it mildly, bogus. This is why the FDA is stepping in.

ryanmercer 8y ago

>regulating the headshop CBD industry is going to do good things. Meh, this just gives people something to manipulate to try and give their snake oil validity "hey the FDA says it's ok!". There's no credible, replicable, evidence CBD does anything beneficial besides acting as a placebo. Just lots of ad copy, 'press releases', SEO link farms, n=1 claims and content claiming the benefits posted directly, or through a layer or two of obfuscation, by manufacturers.

burgerboy 8y ago
Got any data to back that up
toaster42 8y ago
You are being amazingly toxic without contributing meaningfully to this conversation, ryanmercer.

dd36 8y ago

Nearly all regulation is to protect the public from something bad that someone did in the past. Why would you be against that?

donkeyd 8y ago
Because seatbelts, airbags, building codes and things like that are just a huge burden on society.
- _Schizotypy 8y ago
  /s Here you dropped this
pc86 8y ago
There is the ideological argument that a lot of regulation comes out of Congress ceding its lawmaking authority to un-elected and largely unaccountable Executive branch officials. So it's not necessarily a desire that the regulation not exist, but that it come out of Congress so there are faces and names attached to it. And while some regulation is certainly a response to bad actors to say that "nearly all" of the tens of thousands of new pages of regulations written every year are that is going to need some sort of citation.
- Retra 8y ago
  Being "generally against regulation" doesn't imply any specific mitigating rational as you would suggest. Being against poor, mishandled, or unnecessary regulation... yes. But if that was stated, there'd be nothing to argue with.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Ideologically you can be "generally against regulation" because you think it's unnecessary, or because you think more optimal positions will come out of the free market, or because you think corporations having free reign to do whatever they want is not an inherently negative thing. Some of those seems more reasonable than others, of course.

jklinger410 8y ago

>At best, these companies are making money selling snake oil to dying people. At worst, they're introducing dangerous toxic chemicals to immunocompromised individuals and actively harming them. This statement would make a lot more sense if our government did not currently have ignorant and draconian regulations and restrictions around this substance. The snake oil salesman knows it does nothing and sells it anyway. Snake oil is not banned from being studied. CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures. You have an opinion that someone with a PHD needs to sign off on everything you put in your body, that's fine. But that does not equate things that are untested to fucking snake oil, my guy.

nyolfen 8y ago
> CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures. there is a huge issue with quality control for cbd -- it varies wildly between products and is totally impossible to control for. i'm sure it can be medically useful but you must be able to buy a legitimate product first.
- jklinger410 8y ago
  Ok, cool. I totally agree. I'm just not sure how "it's good that CBD is regulated" is similar to "every company that makes CBD is selling snake oil or putting people's lives in danger."
ceejayoz 8y ago
See, this is where "snake oil" claims give us problems - in trying to knock down criticisms of the industry, you're making a false claim. > There is no placebo effect for seizures. "A positive response to placebo administration, manifesting as a decrease in seizure frequency, can be observed in epileptic dogs." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19912522 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19912522 "For unknown reasons, placebos reduce seizures in clinical trials in many patients... Strangely, a meta-analysis found placebo effects in epilepsy trials increased steadily from 1989 to 2010, with decreasing apparent drug treatment effects." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546516/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546516/