CBD in 2020

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There’s no doubt - CBD has become popular over the last few years. It’s no surprise that more and more people are discovering the benefits of this compound in the cannabis plant, and an even bigger surprise that governments around the world are not banning it completely!

The latest statistics are also in favor of CBD. In September this year, the statistics showed that in the USA alone, consumer sales of CBD products reached a staggering $1.2 billion, estimating that number to be nearly $2 billion by 2022.

The total sale of CBD products grew by 706% from 2018 to 2019 in the US alone!

It’s evident that the popularity of CBD products is only going to grow from here, but what are the reasons behind it? Why the sudden interest in CBD?

There are a lot of factors influencing the rise of using CBD products, we’re going to name a few.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

It might come as a surprise to some people, but the pandemic that caught us all unprepared forced people to look for alternative ways to deal with the added stress from daily life.

There are two factors that influence the rise of CBD consumption during COVID-19: high unemployment rate and increased supply. With it, the prices of CBD from April 2019 declined by 79% - from $38 per pound to $8 per pound. This fall in prices motivates more people to use CBD for its therapeutic properties and as an efficient way to deal with increased anxiety levels.

What made things easier for the consumers was the rise of online orders. With people stuck at home, it gave many brands an opportunity to create better marketing strategies and promote ‘two for one’ kind of deals. Boomers were specifically interested to try CBD products as they found out it can act as an excellent pain remedy for their joint pains, arthritis, etc. With these types of deals, both the companies and the CBD consumers benefited, making CBD one of the industries that aren’t affected badly by the pandemic but will also benefit from it.

Legalization

We can’t miss the fact that CBD is still in the grey area of legalization for many countries. For the USA in particular, things started to change for the better in 2018.

In December 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Farm Bill and with it, he opened the gates for any cannabis producer to enter the CBD market as well. Although the bill has a lot of regulations and limitations, it represented an important step towards the complete legalization of CBD as a compound.

The main challenges are related to the different laws from state to state. This resulted in multiple airport arrests, creating additional confusion for the people. Luckily, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) changed its policy last year, allowing passengers to transport CBD oil products and any other FDA cannabis approved product.

Increased Transparency

There’s still a great stigma surrounding anything related to the cannabis industry, but when it comes to CBD products, we can see improvements. The main problem was the lack of trustworthy sources and information related to the benefits of CBD overall.

Medical professionals didn’t want to recommend products they don’t fully understand and companies were not particularly clear in showing their ingredients on the CBD products.

In 2019 and 2020, this changed.

Transparency is demanded from companies and luckily, they’re providing it to the consumers. More research on the use and benefits of CBD is being done and more and more medical professionals are willing to recommend CBD for medical uses, to treat some of the conditions of their patients.

Also, nowadays, people are more open to the idea of reading an online review of a CBD product, they’re more willing to read forums and Quora questions on the characteristics of CBD explained by other people - proving that the CBD stigma will disappear soon enough.

Ongoing Studies

What we know so far on CBD is only the tip of the iceberg. The current studies are showing the incredible potential this product can have and its benefits for the people who use it.

But that’s only the beginning and without further research, we won’t know the rest of the benefits CBD holds for us.

The researches we can definitely look forward to are the ones related to CBD and its influence on people diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). CBD has a calming effect on the neuro system, so we can only hope that these future studies will show its benefit to these conditions as well.

Conclusion

This year has been hard on everyone, but the numbers show, the CBD industry got the best of it. The medical researches are only at the beginning of exploring the characteristics and benefits of CBD, but there are good indicators that things are going to change soon, for the best.