Products containing cannabidiol (CBD) are being sold at Rocketman shop in South Sarasota and hundreds of other stores across the nation, and through online retailers. These CBD-only products are derived from hemp, a variety of cannabis sativa bred to be high in useable fibers and low in THC, the ingredient in marijuana associated with getting high. (Photo by Michael Pollick)

Want some “Hemp Honey,” “Real Scientific Hemp Oil” or “The Remedy”?

Just type your credit card number into sites on the Internet and you can get the second-best-known active ingredient in marijuana, cannabidiol or CBD, delivered in a concentrated form to your home. Or you can walk into a Florida store and bring it home in a bag.

Boosted by the buzz on the potential medical benefits of marijuana, CBD — derived from marijuana’s cousin, the hemp plant — is a hot-ticket item, even though prices are steep, at $50 to $125 for a half-ounce in a bottle.

“There is a big, mad rush now,” said Martin A. Lee, co-founder of Project CBD and author of “Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana.”

“I don’t want to scoff at it, because maybe medical science can do something great in this area. The problem is, it is being marketed as a panacea.”

Consumers should be concerned about the source of this organic compound, whether it was tested for purity, and how it will affect their metabolism of any prescription drugs they are taking.

“It is completely unregulated at the moment,” said Azi Raz, manager of Fort Lauderdale-based Holistic Hope, a 2-year-old business with a storefront that caters to Florida CBD customers.

Raz says Holistic Hope vets its sources for hemp leaves and stems carefully, then tests all the refined products as well, to make sure that they are high in CBD, that they contain none of the euphoria-causing THC and that they do not harbor heavy metal or pesticide residues.

The loophole and the DEA

Those marketing CBD concentrates say they feel they have found a loophole in the legal fence erected around marijuana.

For the most part, they import hemp grown in other countries and then refine the CBD out of it.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, however, says that hemp is just another form of cannabis, and is therefore illegal.

Cannabis is classed as a dangerous narcotic with no known medical value as part of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which is the bible for the DEA.

While it is unlikely that any consumers will be arrested for buying this non-euphoric compound, its federal illegality effectively insures that there is very little regulation.

So far, the biggest thing that has happened on the federal level is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warning letters to CBD vendors in the spring, telling them not to make medical claims about the effectiveness of their product.

CBD, especially when accompanied by a small amount of the psychoactive agent in cannabis called THC, can definitely suppress seizures.

This one benefit helped propel the compound to fame in Sanjay Gupta’s widely viewed CNN documentaries on cannabis.

As a result of those programs, the Charlotte’s Web strain of marijuana, grown by the Stanley brothers in Colorado, became almost a generic reference to marijuana that is high in CBD and low in THC.

Cannabis hybrids that are closer to hemp than to West Coast marijuana are what five Florida growers will be harvesting and processing, once the Florida Department of Health picks out five licensees. That should happen before the end of this month, enabling sales by the spring of 2016.

Even without any THC to help it along, the list of medical properties associated with CBD includes combatting nausea, psychosis, inflammatory disorders, neurogenerative disorders, tumors and cancer cells, and anxiety and depression, according to a prominent marijuana information site, Leafly.com.

“Unfortunately, most of this evidence comes from animals, since very few studies on CBD have been carried out in human patients,” Leafly notes.

An unknown

Whole-plant cannabis has a strong safety record. Nobody is know to have ever died from smoking it or eating it.

But as a single molecule isolated from the plant, CBD is much more of an unknown, says Lee, the Project CBD co-founder.

“The fact is that CBD has many, many drug interactions,” said Lee. “If you’re taking a blood thinner or you have diabetes and take drugs for that, CBD will affect how those drugs are metabolized.”

One scary possibility, he points out, is that someone on chemotherapy for cancer taking CBD on the side may inadvertently be causing the anti-cancer drugs to build up in their system rather than metabolizing at typical rates.

By preventing the breakdown of the anti-cancer drug, he said, “it can accumulate to toxic levels.”

He gets agreement on the need for caution from a Southwest Florida cannabinoid researcher, Gregory Gerdeman.

“There are these CBD concentrates, but it is the Wild West as to how they were derived,” said Gerdeman, a neuro scientist at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. “People should just absolutely demand third-party chemistry. I wouldn’t buy anything without independent lab testing. “

Gerdeman warns that cannabis plants, whether they are hemp or marijuana, are great bio-accumulators. That means if there is pesticide or heavy metals in the ground of the air around them, they will take it in.

The effects can be magnified when the plant material is being concentrated, as it is in making CBD oil, he said.

“It is a botanical extract,” Gerdeman said. “I am a believer in whole-plant cannabis as medicine. But it needs to be clean.”

At Holistic Hope, the business aimed specifically at those who want CBD concentrates, business is booming.

“I would say we have 300 to 400 customers who are placing orders on a consistent basis,” said Raz, the manager.

CBD products can be found at other retail stores, particularly those that specialize in marijuana smoking and vaporizing accessories, such as Rocketman in Sarasota and Druthers Emporium in Port Charlotte.

“We are just kind of testing the waters with CBD,” Druthers manager Eric Perrault said. “We are going to determine whether to add other brands.”