CBD Joints May Help Tobacco Smokers Kick the Habit

Anyone who has ever quit smoking tobacco or tried, or know someone battling tobacco addiction, understands the difficulty of kicking those cancer sticks to the curb. The nicotine in tobacco is so addictive that only 6% of smokers are able to quit each year, but there may be a promising tool to help kick the habit: cannabis, as a recent study published in Addiction found:

“Cannabidiol (CBD), a non‐intoxicating cannabinoid found in cannabis, may be a promising novel smoking cessation treatment due to its anxiolytic properties, minimal side effects and research showing that it may modify drug cue salience.”

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“A single 800‐mg oral dose of cannabidiol reduced the salience and pleasantness of cigarette cues, compared with placebo, after overnight cigarette abstinence in dependent smokers.”

Tobacco smokers looking to quit, or others understanding the medical benefits of CBD, are fueling a boom in sales, as Merry Jane reported:

CBD-only joints are in fact on the rise. Last month, pre-roll tech company Wagner Dimas announced a deal with major Canadian cannabis company Aurora, which may further validate and normalize the novelty of a joint that doesn’t get you high. “We’re the only scaled pre-roll manufacturing platform that exists,” says Dean Arbit, CEO of Wagner Dimas. “Our hardware is conducive to rolling CBD hemp because it’s a whole lot closer to cannabis than tobacco equipment.”

This year, Wagner Dimas is on track to produce roughly 50 million pre-rolls, whereas last year they produced over five million with California licensee Herban, Arbit says. “This scaled platform gives credence to CBD hemp because we can run it in scale as a tobacco alternative,” he adds. “There are herbal cigarettes out there, and it’s roughly a $200 million global market – smokers need to address that oral fixation and the cbd helps with tobacco cessation. We think high terpene cbd hemp is set to explode as seen by the traction it’s gaining in pockets of North America and Europe.”

The market may be about to get that much bigger, too, following FDA’s announcement to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels. “Despite years of aggressive efforts to tackle the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, tobacco use – largely cigarette smoking – still kills more than 480,000 Americans every single year,” wrote FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. “Given their combination of toxicity, addictiveness, prevalence, and effect on non-users, it’s clear that to maximize the possible public health benefits of our regulation, we must focus our efforts on the death and disease caused by addiction to combustible cigarettes.”

The benefits of the cannabis plant never cease to amaze me. I look forward to learning more about CBD at the upcoming International Cannabis Business Conference in Portland this September 27th-28th, where Dean Arbit, will be one of the panelists on hand. Arbit told me that, “I look forward to describing the growing market at the ICBC and answering attendees’ questions and concerns.” One of the best things about cannabis is that doing good work, such as keeping people out of prison, helping patients, and apparently assist people quitting smoking cigarettes, and that good work can also be good business as well.

Don’t miss your opportunity to learn the latest about the cannabis industry and network with top investors and entrepreneurs from around the globe. Get your tickets to the Portland ICBC today.