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Ok, we belatedly replaced the title with representative language from the article.

It would have been helpful if someone had let us know at hn@ycombinator.com that this was needed. We don't come close to seeing all the problems here, or the comments pointing them out.

Industrial Hemp is just cannabis with a THC content under 0.3%. This has been illegal to produce, but people have been doing it in states like CO, OR, etc, that have state-legal cannabis. Until now, CBD has been in a gray area because selling hemp has generally been accepted because of the <0.3% THC.

But now that the 2018 Farm Bill has legalized growing hemp, federally, the FDA is saying, “slow down, CBD is a drug.”

How this affects the CBD industry will be the thing to watch. On the one hand it just got a lot easier to farm the plant. But it’s about to get more regulated. Which is good for consumers who might be taking products that are toxic without realizing it. But it also will probably make it harder to get legit CBD oil to consumers without jumping through a lot of expensive regulatory hoops.

(Agree about the headline being very misleading – this should be changed.)

I don't really know what the regulatory deal is, but on my block there's a 7-11 and a fancy organic store. The 7-11 sells CBD gummies (and kratom, and Soylent...), and the fancy organic store sells CBD coffee.

Has there been a problem with CBD toxicity? Is it likely that it'll be regulated out of corner-store availability?

(My opinion)

I'm generally against any form of regulation, but as long as we live in a society where drug laws already don't make sense, regulating the headshop CBD industry is going to do good things.

The industry around cannabidiol is disgusting, particularly when it comes to products sold outside of states with medical or recreational marijuana. Outside of your average stoner looking for holistic medicine, a great deal of people interested in CBD are cancer patients or family of cancer patients. At best, these companies are making money selling snake oil to dying people. At worst, they're introducing dangerous toxic chemicals to immunocompromised individuals and actively harming them.

I can't find the article but there was news a few years ago about a head chemist stepping down from one of the largest (at the time) legal producers of CBD. She wrote an exposé about how their leadership was pushing for higher purity at the cost of safety, and how it forced her to resign.

Agreed but the government is to blame for a lot of this. People are super thirsty for CBD, it is very effective for many people. Especially elderly people that have been anti-pot most of their lives.

These people don't have any good ways of making good buying decisions, let a lone having a regulatory body to rely on to test this stuff. So they just choose stuff with good marketing and high concentrations.

Not to say your article isn't making a good point -- just that these nasty companies being successful is due to a vacuum created by decades of complete head-up-our-own-ass marijuana policy.

There’s no regulatory body testing most things, especially chemicals. It’s tragic.

I find the premise that consumers need ahead-of-time protection insulting and limiting. If wrongs are made, we have a system for remedy: tort. The FDA is an adjacent regulatory body. Through its risk adverse behavior, the FDA causes unseen deaths: https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/fda-poli... Also, the FDA performs poor data collection and sharing. When I analyzed one of the FDA'S most important datasets, I was surprised to find such low quality: https://github.com/statwonk/FDA-adverse-drug-reactions/blob/... What's tragic to me is that so often folks feel safety or wealth comes from the government rather than our own minds. Maybe if there's no safety facade they'll demand private labs certify safety?

What do you think about Thalidomide then? http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/them...

A back pat for a function the market would have provided immediately. Drugs can definitely be poison. I'd much prefer safety analyses have a GitHub sha1 publicly accessible than secretively behind the FDA's closed doors.

> a function the market would have provided immediately.

This opinion would seem to be at odds with reality at large.

The reason the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act was passed in the first place is because of all the harm that the (then unregulated) pharmaceutical industry was doing. The market had centuries' worth of time to correct for people taking all sorts of drugs that actively kill people, and it didn't. It was only regulation that started to get the mess under control.

And it's the loopholes in regulation where things are worst. The supplement industry continues to do far more harm than good.

It's just possible that, despite the best efforts of some economists to argue that everyone is perfectly knowledgeable, rational, and emotionless in order to simplify their models, people continue to be merely human.

What? The FDA openly publishes stuff. From long before GitHub was around.

Here's a good overview of how they go about making sure that approved drugs are GRASE (Generally Recognized As Safe and Effective): https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm14353...

Even more than that, the FDA requires openness in a way that I'm not sure would be accomplishable without.

Publication bias is a real thing, and drug companies do know how to use it to their advantage. Take a look at what drug trial results looked like before and after the FDA started requiring pre-registration. The difference is, to put it mildly, staggering.

I'm pretty hard pressed to come up with a market equivalent to drug trial pre-registration. Given everything I've seen of Adam Smith's writings, I'm pretty sure that, were he alive today, he'd probably say something like, "Duh, of course. Do that. That is some excellent regulation, and obviously in the service of the public good."

Tangentially, I'm guessing that, if CBD had to go through pre-registered drug trials, it wouldn't be such a big deal. The funny thing about things that are widely believed to help with every last ailment is, they tend to all be about equally good at treating pretty much everything.

Your Freedom Markets™ position doesn't account for information asymmetry, aka power imbalance.

The views above share a similarity to the anti-vaccine crowd. Basically the FDA does such a great job at keeping our drug supply safe that people fail to properly understand the risks, just like vaccinations have done such a great job of preventing devistating illnesses.

The most telling clue is he said the remedy for bad drugs is tort... Showing he clearly doesn’t understand the severity of the problem.

Sorry our drugs killed your kid, but now you can sue us so everything is ok.

They did have one good point, which is what is the opportunity cost of slowing down drug development with regulation and which way does the least harm. I don’t have the data to back up either side, but I’m not seeing a ton (there are some though) of medical breakthroughs in less regulated countries.

If they're great, why not publish the work to GitHub?

Diffuse or latent injury is hard to protect against with tort. And afaik a judge can’t declare some chemical illegal. Moreover, forced arbitration has destroyed tort in the US. The only source of broad accountability is government. An individual case in arbitration is insufficient deterrence and arbitrators tend to lowball plaintiffs relative to juries and public courts. There is virtually no ability to appeal.

Most of the claims about CBD are, to put it mildly, bogus.

This is why the FDA is stepping in.

Nearly all regulation is to protect the public from something bad that someone did in the past. Why would you be against that?

Because seatbelts, airbags, building codes and things like that are just a huge burden on society.

/s Here you dropped this

There is the ideological argument that a lot of regulation comes out of Congress ceding its lawmaking authority to un-elected and largely unaccountable Executive branch officials. So it's not necessarily a desire that the regulation not exist, but that it come out of Congress so there are faces and names attached to it.

And while some regulation is certainly a response to bad actors to say that "nearly all" of the tens of thousands of new pages of regulations written every year are that is going to need some sort of citation.

Being "generally against regulation" doesn't imply any specific mitigating rational as you would suggest. Being against poor, mishandled, or unnecessary regulation... yes. But if that was stated, there'd be nothing to argue with.

Ideologically you can be "generally against regulation" because you think it's unnecessary, or because you think more optimal positions will come out of the free market, or because you think corporations having free reign to do whatever they want is not an inherently negative thing. Some of those seems more reasonable than others, of course.

>At best, these companies are making money selling snake oil to dying people. At worst, they're introducing dangerous toxic chemicals to immunocompromised individuals and actively harming them.

This statement would make a lot more sense if our government did not currently have ignorant and draconian regulations and restrictions around this substance.

The snake oil salesman knows it does nothing and sells it anyway. Snake oil is not banned from being studied.

CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures.

You have an opinion that someone with a PHD needs to sign off on everything you put in your body, that's fine. But that does not equate things that are untested to fucking snake oil, my guy.

> CBD absolutely helps with seizures and anxiety. I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures.

there is a huge issue with quality control for cbd -- it varies wildly between products and is totally impossible to control for. i'm sure it can be medically useful but you must be able to buy a legitimate product first.

Ok, cool. I totally agree.

I'm just not sure how "it's good that CBD is regulated" is similar to "every company that makes CBD is selling snake oil or putting people's lives in danger."

See, this is where "snake oil" claims give us problems - in trying to knock down criticisms of the industry, you're making a false claim.

> There is no placebo effect for seizures.

"A positive response to placebo administration, manifesting as a decrease in seizure frequency, can be observed in epileptic dogs." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19912522

"For unknown reasons, placebos reduce seizures in clinical trials in many patients... Strangely, a meta-analysis found placebo effects in epilepsy trials increased steadily from 1989 to 2010, with decreasing apparent drug treatment effects." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546516/

>See, this is where "snake oil" claims give us problems

I agree.

The claim I'm making about placebo and seizures is that a seizure is dangerous, and anything that reduces the seizure is a medication. Sugar pill or no.

If the claim is that CBD compounds are more dangerous than seizures, or that what is in CBD compounds is dangerous at all (fear of the unknown, if you will) then the burden of proof should be on the poster to show examples of dangerous chemicals in CBD tinctures.

My proof, empirical or no, is that CBD reduces anxiety and seizures. I have not seen evidence to the contrary.

Sorry, but that's not what you claimed.

> I don't need some retroactive scientific study to show this because the evidence is already there, vouched for by those who use it. There is no placebo effect for seizures.

Hemp (according to the FDA[1]) is just cannabis with very low THC. It can look nearly identical to "marijuana". Hemp is to marijuana as Dachsunds are to Golden Retrievers.

Super "dank" CDB plants already exist (see "Ringo's Gift"). Its not a stretch to get them under .3% thc.

1. https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/PublicHealthFocus/ucm421168.h...

Scientifically, sure. But legally these are all totally different. "Marihuana" is different from "Cannabis" in the eye of the DEA.

The legal definition (I believe) is split by THC concentrations.

It's dependent on what part of the plant it's derived from --- whether it's fiberous or not. Notably, flowers are marijuana.

> The term 'marihuana' means all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds or resin. Such term does not include the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.

Can you explain exactly how "Hemp has been legal for a long time"?

Individuals and businesses were able to grow and sell hemp in this United States? When did this begin and what federal action made it legal?

Hemp started to get federally deregulated in 2014 with the passage of the 2014 Farm Bill - this bill properly defined hemp as "cannabis sativa with <0.3% THC" and allowed states to start pilot programs to farm hemp. The Appropriations Act also prohibited law enforcement (including DEA) from interfering with hemp.

However, there was still a lot of confusion as DEA published statements that sent mixed signals to the industry and customers. For instance, the 2014 farm bill legalized hemp & farming, but what about its derivatives (i.e. seeds, extracts)? The 2018 Farm Bill clarifies all this by including hemp and all its derivatives.

No he can't because it's factually inaccurate. Hemp growing had been considered production a Schedule 1 controlled substance for decades. CBD was also in a weird gray area of semi-legality. Despite lax enforcement of the laws, it was could have technically been brought up under the Controlled Substances Act but it didn't seem like anyone had any interest in doing that.

In addition, while people may have been running grey area hemp production, they would have had to be entirely uninsured and cash funded as most banks and insurance companies wouldn't touch someone violating federal law with a ten foot pole. This changes that as well, allowing for greater expansion.

That’s all this “farm bill” did for hemp? What a shame

More importantly even though it is legal at the federal level now there are still states where it is illegal.