CBD!

I'm seeing places that promote CBD everywhere in New York these days. CBD apparently can cure every single problem you might have. Neuralgia, sinus trouble, lumbago, chilblains, Igor's hump, macular degeneration, inflammation, handmaid's knee, you name it, this modern medical miracle does everything but the dishes. So why is it usually promoted in storefronts where burnouts and vapers hang around?

For the record, a friend of mine was told to try CBD (cannabidiol) for tinnitus. He'd tried everything else. Once when drunk he'd even tried putting a screwdriver in his ear. So now that he doesn't drink anymore, he was a little nervous about taking something that came from marijuana. He was assured that it wouldn't get him stoned. He was also concerned that it would make him look stoned on a pee test -- he was driving a school bus part-time. 

Well, none of the three happened -- he didn't get stoned, he didn't give a dirty urine, and CBD did nothing for his tinnitus. 

Since CBD is advertised all over the place, over the 'Net, in magazines, and so on, I hope people going to it for relief have found what they wanted, but I'm pretty certain it's been oversold. Harvard is pretty skeptical about it. So is the FDA. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration has only approved a small number of drugs that use marijuana in any way:   

• Epidiolex, which contains a purified form of CBD derived from cannabis, was approved for the treatment of seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome or Dravet syndrome, two rare and severe forms of epilepsy.
• Marinol and Syndros, which contain dronabinol (synthetic THC), and Cesamet, which contains nabilone (a synthetic substance similar to THC), are approved by the FDA. Dronabinol and nabilone are used to treat nausea and vomiting caused by cancer chemotherapy. Dronabinol is also used to treat loss of appetite and weight loss in people with HIV/AIDS.

I always thought that medical marijuana was just a stalking horse to promote the legalization of marijuana, and I think time has proved me right. After all, if THC -- the fun ingredient -- was so helpful for glaucoma and whatnot, why not have a pill form that could be dispensed by prescription? But no, the fight was always about letting Grandma take a bong hit for her chemo nausea because reasons. And the reasons were, people wanted to get stoned, and the state wanted us to be able to sedate ourselves while taking a big fat cut. Of course, it hasn't worked out that way. Freelance (shall we say) marijuana sellers can undercut the government by a large amount, and states like California are not seeing nearly the tax revenues they expected. Meanwhile, the government has put its stamp of approval on pot, like it does on booze, and more people are using both.

Who could have foreseen all that, except anyone?

In my wayward youth I was pretty much just a drinker, and that was bad enough, but I wanted to use it to have fun on the go or pound beer with my pals while conversing into the night. I didn't want to sit around and stare at lava lamps. But to each his own, I guess. 

Still, I'm not a fan, and I'm not happy to see even more burnouts around in the kids than we had when I was in high school, and we had a lot of burnouts in my high school. It just seems to make people into wasteoids (another term of art in my youth) at an earlier age. Plus, in my large and overcrowded city high school, not one kid died from drugs in the four years I was there; now it's a common tragedy. 

What things have changed since 1999?