With Meghna Chakrabarti CBD products are all the rage. What you need to know about the marijuana ingredient that’s being used for conditions including insomnia, anxiety and epilepsy. Guests Amanda Chicago Lewis, investigative reporter for Rolling Stone. She has reported extensively on the marijuana industry. (@msamandalewis) Julie Nardy, she's a buyer and salesperson at Clovers Natural Market, which has been selling CBD products for a little over a year. Dr. Kevin Hill, director of addiction psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and professor of psychiatry Harvard Medical School. Author of "Marijuana: The Unbiased Truth about the World's Most Popular Weed." (@DrKevinHill) Interview Highlights On the state of CBD in the U.S. Amanda Chicago Lewis: "CBD is for sure everywhere. It really started to hit the mainstream in 2013 when Sanjay Gupta talked about it in his famous documentary 'Weed' that aired on CNN, and the demand based on that documentary led to a spread in the seeds , and explosion in the growth, especially beginning in 2014 after it became a little bit easier to grow hemp in the United States. And so I think that after enough harvests passed and enough people became familiar with it and wanted to start their own CBD companies, now you see it everywhere." On understanding cannabis as "a drug development toolkit" ACL: "One thing about the popularity of CBD that might be nice is that it's waking people up to the fact that the word 'cannabis' is similar to the word 'dog,' in that it could have a pretty huge range of expressions, right? You could see a chihuahua and you could also see a husky, and both of those are dogs. So someone described cannabis recently to me as less of a drug and more of a drug development toolkit, and I liked that phrasing a lot, because it helps talk about the fact that what we think of as marijuana — one thing that gets you high, always the same plant — is in fact sort of a black box of compounds that you could breed in and out. THC and CBD are only two of many compounds." On the research surrounding CBD Dr. Kevin Hill: "It is quite a compound. I mean, it's an extremely promising compound but we really need to be clear about where the level of research is. So there is a difference between pre-clinical and animal research, and randomized clinical trials where thousands of patients have used a medicine so it can be studied properly. So with cannabidoil, CBD, we really only have very very strong evidence for a couple of conditions, whereas unfortunately we've got people using it for myriad conditions at this point."

"I think it's critical for people who are profiting from the cannabis industry to bear some of this responsibility for funding." Dr. Kevin Hill

On the efficacy and safety of CBD KH: "I think there may be some placebo effect involved here, but I also want to emphasize, I'm very, very excited about cannabadiol. There are many conditions for which there is strong pre-clinical evidence, and that leads the way to additional clinical trials. But, importantly, there are things that we don't know about it. We don't know the chronic effects of cannabidol used, we don't know the interactions it may have with other drugs that people may be taking, and so there's a dire need for research. I think it's critical for people who are profiting from the cannabis industry to bear some of this responsibility for funding. It's better to get the answer than to continue to have people take CBD for conditions that we really don't know much about at this point." ACL: "Yeah, I just want to say that with all this cautionary science being thrown around that the World Health Organization has found that CBD is safe in any amount. So yes, we direly need more research, but it's also a generally safe thing to be taking, and the biggest issue is probably the lack of regulation. So, like other supplements in the U.S., you don't really know what you're actually getting because it hasn't been tested, so you might be buying something that says CBD and it actually doesn't have CBD in it." KH: "And so just to clarify what the WHO said -- I was asked to be at that meeting, and I presented to the expert committee on drug dependence, and so they are all very, very optimistic about cannabidoil. And what they said was that it should not be scheduled, and therefore opening the door to that level of research that I was alluding to. They also pointed out that, again for epilepsy, evidence is very, very strong. For other conditions, it really isn't as strong at this point. So there is a critical need for more work to be done in this area."

"We can talk about the science all day long, and what's there and what's not there, but the thing that's really got to change is federal policy." Amanda Chicago Lewis