Healthy living
the effects of CBD and other cannabis compounds on patients, Sodergren hopes that more of these treatments will one day be made available to the general public.
This is where Sapphire Medical Clinics comes in. Established by Sodergren in 2019, this award- winning chain of privatised clinics based in the UK and Scotland can offer access to medicinal cannabis for all conditions acknowledged to benefit from it. For Sodergren, the benefits are twofold: Sapphire enables patients to receive safe, clinically administered treatments, while a library of data can be compiled to assess how cannabinoids can improve clinical outcomes. “Academically, it’s been very, very fruitful,” he says. “There’s still a paucity of high-quality clinical research globally in cannabinoids, and so that’s been a lot of fun. We’ve had some really interesting results.”
Dynamic forms of CBD
One of around 100 chemicals (also known as Cannabinoids) found in the cannabis sativa plant, Cannabidiol is the lesser-known cousin of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the ingredient found in pot that elicits a mind tingling “high”. CBD, meanwhile, is broadly considered to be its better-behaved twin: a non-intoxicating substance that is well tolerated by the body which has its own network of endocannabinoid receptors. First identified in the early 1990s by Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, researchers know that cannabinoids work by binding to receptors in our body called endocannabinoids. They are certain that the endocannabinoid system plays an instrumental role in regulating bodily processes like pain, memory and sleep cycles, but they still don’t fully understand how it functions. That hasn’t stopped CBD from being sold in various guises as something of a wellness panacea, however, most frequently as bottles of oil or balms but also in sweets and cosmetic products. Since around 2015, CBD products have been steadily growing in popularity in the UK, predominantly through word of mouth. From alleviating muscle soreness and revolutionising skin care to suppressing chronic anxiety, claims around the potential benefits of CBD supplements have exploded. In the US alone, sales of CBD are projected to reach $1.8bn by 2022, while in Europe they should hit around €1.4bn by 2023. From a regulatory point of view, CBD has been plagued by a lack of understanding around the substance – and thus outdated legal frameworks. While it was a general rule that industrial hemp strains grown and sold in the EU and the UK must
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
Mikael Sodergren (pictured) claims that CBD can offer patients signifi cant pain relief.
contain 0.2% THC or less, concerns around the quality of CBD products began to proliferate in 2019. In particular, when test results conducted by the Centre for Medicinal Cannabis found that 62% of the UK high street products studied didn’t contain the CBD content promised on the label. Others had high levels of the THC, while a few merely contained alcohol. By classing hemp and thus CBD as a novel food source the European Union – and the UK Government – have avoided the unenviable task of removing all counterfeit CBD products from the market.
“At some point, we’ll get to a stage where we know exactly what it is that’s having the desired effect, we’ll be able to take those compounds and give them to patients in the desired quantities.”
Mikael Sodergren
“The problem is that it got too big to do that,” explains Steven Moore, co-founder of The Association for the Cannabinoid Industry (ACI), a group devoted to better regulating the cannabinoid market. “There weren’t enough resources to remove CBD products, so what they did was they went back to basics and decided to consider it as a dietary supplement, which is a more sensible way of doing it.”
Since 2019, novel food legislation passed by the European Commission has advised that producers submit detailed information on their substances, including rigorous toxicology reports. However, the UK remains the only country to require companies to submit an application for their CBD products where they must be cleared by the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA). “Next year, Britain will produce the first ever approved consumer cannabis products, so they’ve
6million
The number of people in the UK who have already tried CBD, of whom 1.3 million are regular users.
Canex 77
H_Ko/
Shutterstock.com
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