New Research on CBD: No Liver Damage

In exciting news for the medicinal use of cannabinoids, Hemp Today reports on a new study that counters the assertion that CBD use causes liver damage. "A Colorado research company said it found no clinical evidence of liver disease in patients studied after using CBD for 60 days. The research, financed by 12 U.S. CBD companies, refutes shoddy research done on mice two years ago that rattled CBD companies after it received wide coverage in the media.", Hemp Today reports.

Companies providing financing, products and certificates of authenticity, and helping recruit the consumers who participated in the study include "Asterra Labs, Care by Design, CBDistillery, CBD American Shaman, Charlotte’s Web, Columbia Care, Global Widget, HempFusion, In nite CBD, Kannaway, Medterra CBD and SunMed CBD."

THE LEGACY OF THE MISLEADING EWING STUDY

Hemp Today points out that "Critics at the time noted that the doses administered to the mice were more than 100 times the recommended daily dose of the prescription-only high-CBD drug Epidiolex, which suggests daily intake of maximum 20 mg per kg body weight."

Dear readers of The American Cannabis Report, the amount of MISLEADING DATA about liver damage ("hepatoxicity") that emerged from The Mouse Study (also known as the Ewing Study at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) was far worse than that.

In their article "Is Cannabidiol Hepatotoxic or Hepatoprotective: A Review" SJ Stohs and SD Ray lay out the evolution of the liver-damage issue. Stohs is SJ Stohs is associate with the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions, Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha and the Department of Scientific Affairs of Boston Biopharm Inc. in Southlake, TX. Ray is associated with the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, Touro College of Pharmacy, in New York City.

In fact, in The Ewing Study young mice were injected with massive doses of CBD up to 123 times greater than an FDA-approved CBD drug. If that seems like a lot, consider the following: prescribing Epidiolex provides a child with an ALREADY EXTREMELY HIGH DOSE OF CBD (20 mg per kg of body weight).

But that's not all. Most of the children in early epilepsy studies were also taking a drug called valproic acid, which is a know hepatotoxic agent. Therefore, it should never have been concluded that CBD was responsible for elevated liver toxins.

Here's the key bit of information:

• As anyone know who takes CBD regularly the typical daily dose of CBD is 15 mg regardless of body weight.

• Stohs and Ray find that "extrapolated to a 60 kg human per FDA guidelines, this would represent a single dose of 11,070 mg of CBD in humans."

• They also find that "The doses of CBD that may be appropriate when used for providing relief for aches and pains, headaches, insomnia, and so on, are in the range of 25–100 mg/day. Taken together, this suggests that CBD-induced hepatotoxicity reported in mice in the recent literature is not pharmacologically relevant.

In short, the Mouse Study was flawed, the persistence of the "possibility of liver damage" is as flawed as other Reefer Madness propaganda, and the reverberations of cannabis and hemp being stuck on Schedule 1 so that no decent scientific studies could be completed until 2021 is an enduring stain on the legacy of the American health system.

IMAGE SOURCE: Lindgren Functional Medicine