Can CBD oil get you high? A new look at medical cannabis

"..a lot of people are calling CBD “medical marijuana” to distinguish it from THC, which has medicinal properties, but also some undesirable side-effects"

Can CBD oil get you high? A new look at medical cannabis

Just say the words “medical cannabis”, and you can see people’s instant reaction. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all about the high, and although nobody begrudges terminally ill patients anything that makes them feel that life is a bit more tolerable, they’re still convinced that “high” is what you get when you use medical marijuana. But can CBD oil get you high? A lot of people are calling CBD “medical marijuana” to distinguish it from THC, which has medicinal properties, but also some undesirable side-effects.

The yin and yang of marijuana

It’s almost strange that two such similar compounds, both found in marijuana, and both being classified as cannabinoids, can have differing effects. While THC is known for it’s psychoactive effects, CBD isn’t.

Think about it: here we have a plant based cannabinoid that acts on the human endocannabinoid system, but it doesn’t make you feel odd in any way. To some, this means that it must surely be less effective and have different uses to THC, but although finer distinctions will no doubt be drawn on the basis of future research, you will find that CBD is currently being studied for the same list of ailments that THC is believed to address.

Can CBD oil get you high? Experts say it can’t

The reason why CBD oil in the form of “Charlotte’s web” is so often used in pediatric cases, particularly as a treatment for children with seizures, is simply because parents need not fear that they are giving underage children a psychoactive substance. Of course, the newspapers will lead with an attention-getting headline that seems to indicate that babies are being given psychoactive marijuana, but that isn’t true in most cases.

Pharmaceutical companies, researchers and doctors actually prefer using CBD oil, simply because they know they have a good chance of positive effects, and absolutely no chance of any negative ones. There are even those who are hailing CBD as a “new” discovery despite the fact that people have been using non-psychoactive hemp as a medicine for thousands of years. The actual compounds THC and CBD were identified decades ago, and CBD used to be a significant component in marijuana oils – before Cannabis users started breeding it out of plants because it counteracted the effects of THC.

Medicine shouldn’t make you necessarily high

Most of us avoid medicines that make us feel sleepy, floaty or odd, so to say that CBD is less effective than THC simply because it doesn’t make stoners happy is illogical. The reason why so many believe that cannabinoids have a role to play in our health is the fact that our bodies produce their own cannabinoids and are loaded with receptors that these chemical messengers act on. It is believed that our natural cannabinoids help to keep our bodies in balance, a process known as homeostasis, and that if they are lacking, they can be supplemented with plant-based cannabinoids.

Can CBD oil get you high? No. It can’t. But that doesn’t mean it can’t share many of the properties attributed to THC with that one distinctive difference.