A few weeks ago, at the Fremont Hills Country Club near Silicon Valley, a hundred or so women came together for a bit of a girl’s night out. They were coming to hear Amanda Jones talk about her new tea, Kikoko, which contains cannabinoids, and nobody was under any illusion that they were the normal market for something that could get you high. But that is what Jones specialises in: proving to people that the old way of taking pot just won’t cut it in 2018. Pot is sexier, classier, healthier and bougier than you thought it was and plenty of people are getting in on the next big industry. By the end of the "high tea", Jones was convinced she had some new and unexpected converts among her ranks of fans.

“I’ve become a spokesperson for cannabis. Who would have thought?” said Jones when we met. “At my age! A cannabis activist!”

Cannabis has been a useful medicine since antiquity: the oldest references date back 4000BC in China. Ancient Egypt, India, Greece and Rome all showed interest in cannabis usage. In the UK it was available until 1928, but for the last 90 years it’s been off limits. The final nail in the coffin was the UN Single Convention Of Narcotic Drugs in 1961, which basically stated it was of no medicinal value and should be tightly controlled.

As it went underground and was increasingly bred to get people high, the levels of THC in plants have gone off the scale: “Normal cannabis has about two per cent THC. Now it’s bred for around 30 per cent,” explained Jones. “It’s a big difference, which is why when people smoke it they say, ‘Oh, my god! This isn’t the same weed I smoked in the Sixties and Seventies.’”

Now, thanks to regulation and consistency of product, we’re seeing an understanding of cannabis and cannabinoids as something useful rather than something to be condemned: while THC is addictive in a small number of people (about ten per cent) in comparison to opioids or alcohol, cannabis cannot kill you if you consume too much. It may, however, cause psychiatric attacks if taken in large enough doses, which can sometimes be the risk with high-THC strains. New companies are cutting out the mould, the pesticides and the irregular dosages of the old stuff and making it homogenous, tasty and healthy. Legalisation in American states such as Colorado and in Canada and Uruguay has led to cannabis being seen as a product for wellness, one that can be branded and sold as part of the health industry: it is predicted that spending on legal cannabis will reach £45 billion by 2027.

Kikoko tea, founded by Jones and her friend Jennifer Chapin, came about after their friend’s battle with cancer. They’re a cannabis company first and foremost, but have started making teas infused with CBD, THC and other cannabinoids that don’t taste like swamp water thanks to their process for treating the oils. There are four currently on the market: Sensuali-tea, Sympa-tea, Positivi-tea and Tranquili-tea. Some are great for stimulating conversation (or other things) while others just make you, in Jones' words, "a nicer person".

'I thought this is a human rights violation, if people can't get hold of this'

After diving into the research – Jones is a former journalist – she was shocked at how clearcut she found the evidence to be on the side of cannabis. “I thought this is a human rights violation, if people can't get hold of this,” snapped Jones. “They're giving us all these pharmaceuticals... killing in the hundreds of thousands globally.” So the two of them looked into creating a tea that could help with the problems people like them faced and for which cannabinoids were the perfect solution.

In the last year, cannabis has faced a reckoning in the UK. We as a nation were asked to consider if our paranoia surrounding drugs went so far that we would prevent two epileptic children – Alfie Dingley and Billy Caldwell – from receiving the medicinal cannabis oil that helped them go about their lives. The UK ended up allowing doctors to prescribe medicinal cannabis, a huge shift. With the help of major medical studies and a look at the unexpected demographics benefiting from cannabinoids, we are allowing our view of cannabis to widen to see it as a useful tool for patients, including cancer patients going through radiotherapy.

"When you give this before radiotherapy [patients] have much better response than expected and, more importantly, the surrounding tissues are not damaged, which is a great limitation of radiotherapy," explained Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St George’s, University Of London and principal of the Institute For Cancer Vaccines And Immunotherapy. Now companies such as Kikoko – and others based in the UK – are looking to prove that cannabinoids can work for things much more mundane than extreme medical conditions: they're just as good for sleep, sex and anxiety.

Whenever I spoke to anyone who was involved in the changing face of cannabinoids and cannabis, they mentioned a part of the human body I had never heard of: the endocannabinoid system. “Your endocannabinoid system is your third biggest system,” Aaron Horn from retailer LDN CBD told me. “It's still not taught in most medical schools, but it's responsible for homeostastis, balancing appetite, bone growth, mood, weight gain, weight loss, sleep, fertility and immunity."

It was an Israeli researcher, Dr Raphael Mechoulam, who discovered the system in the Nineties. His group isolated cannabinoids – 2-AG and anandamide – in the human body and found out how they operated.

'For various conditions, including depression and anxiety at low doses, there is a mounting body of evidence. It's not just bunk science'

“This system was named the endocannabinoid system because it is an endogenous system whose components resemble the activity of a compound derived from the cannabis plant called THC,” explained Dr Mechoulam when we spoke. “THC binds and activates the cannabinoid receptors. Thus it mimics the activity of anandamide and of 2-AG.”

Research such as Dr Mechoulam’s is part of a growing move by august institutions to look at the actual medical effects of cannabis on people. “For various conditions, including depression and anxiety at low doses, there is a mounting body of evidence that is being studied all over the world in prestigious universities and clinics. It's no longer bunk science,” said Jones.

But, said Dr Mechoulam, the research is still not quite enough: “We badly need clinical trials in most of the diseases in which cannabis is used, such as cancer and auto-immune diseases.”

The West Coast’s adoption of CBD as part of a healthy lifestyle, rather than as part of trying to see how stoned you can get off high-level THC weed, has had an effect on how CBD is seen in other countries too: in England, CBD is moving weed out of bong shops and vapes and into clean, bright spaces that look like yoga studios.

In the UK, CBD can be sold, but with almost no THC whatsoever – below 0.3 per cent THC is legal. In the medicinal products, the sort of drugs that Billy Caldwell or Alfie Dingley need, the percentages of THC are far higher. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t still benefiting from the products now on the market.

You can get CBD oils in Holland & Barrett or LloydsPharmacy now, but there’s also artisanal outlets emerging: LDN CBD is the city’s first CBD-specific boutique. The shop is crisp and white, with a massage space and a venue for gong meditation downstairs. It sells products that are deemed organic in their countries of origin. It is, in every way, the Goopification of ganj.

Aaron Horn, the company’s co-founder, started taking CBD two years ago to help with his anxiety. He got it from a shop in Glastonbury – “A great place, the guy has changed the name of his shop to Free Cannabis, great guy, never open” – while co-founder Joseph Oliver had become interested in the new age of stuff coming out of North America.

Horn is more than aware that cannabis has a very difficult image: mainly because of newspapers and other influential parties describing it as a dangerous threat to society. But, he said, the way we’ve come to see weed smoking is as the sort of thing the boys do at home with a couple of beers and it can be very off-putting to women who might benefit from CBD or THC.

“It’s become very seedy. It doesn’t have a very feminine energy and I think that kind of masculine/feminine space is important,” said Horn. “We have a lot of female customers who’ve had bad experiences smoking weed, men too, but there’s this kind of lad culture of ‘Let’s get really drunk, really stoned. Yeah, oh man.’” Lloyds Pharmacy has found that women are its biggest market too: 66 per cent of buyers are women, and most of them are over the age of 25.

Introducing CBD as something designed for women is exactly what Amanda Jones and Kikoko are doing too. The thing is, Jones said, while it’s designed for the problems women face, it has a huge male fanbase too. “We probably get an equal number of testimonials from men and women," she explained. "It's been a fantastic surprise and it helps with libidos in men as well. It increases the sensation of orgasm in men equally. Their mood? Same thing."

Jones has also faced the difficulty of convincing people of colour to work for her: institutional racism in America has long enjoyed using cannabis possession and dealing as an excuse to incarcerate people of colour en masse and so when the industry legalised it was the black and latino population of California who were most reticent to engage in an industry that had once been used against them. "It was too frightening for them, the memories too harsh," explained Jones. "Now that's changed, fortunately. Really changed, thank god, so we've been able to hire some really talented, incredible people."

Horn has also found that having a physical store has helped to ease a lot of people, who might have previously held strong views about the dangers of CBD, into trying their first oils or capsules. “There’s that association with online and illegal drugs. People want to come into a shop and buy a capsule to add to their capsule routine,” he explained. “It’s that culture of not making them afraid or scared of it. Pushing back against that is a big change. That’s what’s happening in the West Coast with these high-end brands.”

Now, Horn sees an incredibly diverse clientele popping into the store. “Their age, their race, their gender have totally surprised me, from older guys coming in for their wives to homosexual couples who want it for their dogs to parents who want it for their kids who are at university and are really stressed out. It’s bringing people together.”

Countries and individual American states have begun legalisation and now the cat is officially out of the bag: in Colorado and Washington state, crime is down; studies find that places with legal weed see drops in the levels of opioid addiction; and the economy booms. Colorado’s economy saw an additional $58m thanks to legalised weed and taxes on it.

Britain is already the world’s largest producer of legal cannabis. We produced 95 tonnes in 2016 – almost half the world’s legal output – and much of it goes towards the production of Sativex, an MS treatment that's hard to come by on the NHS. Yet we are still a country locked in ethical debates about whether we should be giving it to epileptic children.

Now that people can go into a high street store and pick up a CBD oil, we need to start thinking about the person we think is purchasing cannabis-based products. More importantly, we need to think about the financial gains that legalised states and nations have seen from accepting a huge and profitable industry.

“[Britain] has a lot of farmable land, so it seems to make sense to be getting into it,” said Kikoko’s Amanda Jones. “Brexit is taking people away from things like focusing on marijuana legalisation, but you could be regulating it, which is so important!”

“A million people would benefit if it was legally available tomorrow in chemists,” said Aaron Horn of LDN CBD. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s happening in our culture, the only thing that can help against Brexit, can help economically, provide jobs and have a positive impact.”

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