A man who vaped fake CBD oil has described the moment it almost killed him.

Jay Jenkins, from Lexington in the US state of South Carolina, bought what he thought was legitimate CBD oil from a petrol station at the suggestion of a friend.

Jay told CNN: “I didn’t think there was any risk in trying it. I’d never heard of anybody having any negative effects from it, so I thought I had nothing to lose.

“I took two puffs of it, next thing you know I’m feeling crazy, not thinking straight, not able to move.”

He had frightening hallucinations and fell unconscious. Friends drove him to Lexington Medical Center, where he started having seizures.

On the Glasgow Coma Scale – a practical method for assessment of impairment of conscious level in response to defined stimuli – he was a three, denoting a ‘severe brain injury’.

There have been a string of deaths linked to vaping in the US

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta said: “He thought he was doing everything right. When this product was subsequently tested it had no CBD in it at all.

“It was entirely synthetic. There’s no regulation around this – there’s no regulation that requires these products to be authentic, that they be safe, that they be tested.”

The journalist also described the lax regulatory framework for CBD products in the US as ‘the Wild West’.

Hundreds of cases of mysterious lung illnesses across the US have been tied to vaping by health officials. At least 12 people have died.

Many of the patients are teens and young adults and symptoms include difficulty breathing, a cough, vomiting, fever, and chest pain. Some of those affected have been hospitalised and many were placed on ventilators.