The CMC issued a report a few days ago, and in true CMC form it’s fatally flawed.
Anyone who has ever been involved with these people know that they have always gotten entangled with CBD products and medicinal cannabis with an aim to control them. They don’t like it when you call them out, of course, but take this example when UPA made a tidy turnover selling CBD as a “medicine”.
They were warned that this had to stop, even contacted by the MHRA and told, but they carried on regardless and in this new venture funded by and consisting of the usual suspects, and spouting the usual rubbish. This time they’ve gone one step further in taking your CBD products away from you.
Indeed, CMC advertised themselves as the industry’s “first trade association”, and yet they’re at least 2 years behind the curve, in fact their agenda (nothing really changes) is simply to gather around them a gaggle of companies that are more interested in CBD as a medicine, which are far from professional in many cases and misguided in others.
We had a conversation with a medical professional the other day (one of the leading lights) who was more than concerned that their agenda didn’t seem to stack up at all.
So, they had a load of products tested and it’s a fact that unless members aren’t telling us (and they usually do) that only one of our products were tested as not what was advertised (so 30 of the “leading brands” haven’t really been tested have they, or their flawed results don’t stack up…) and the one that we know was tested was advertised as 5% CBD was 4.2% and another 1.3% CBDa.
We know from tests we have consistently had performed that almost all non-CTA brands are around 8-10% under, the amount of CBD in a 5% bottle (or 500mg) is usually around 440 – 460mg of CBD (CBD weighs less than water and 500mg of extract doesn’t equal 500mg of CBD). We have always encouraged our companies to understand this and most of our members now follow this practice or have better labeling to show it.
We’ve tested literally hundreds of samples over the last 3 years and very little has changed. Many brands are still consistently under the actual stated amounts though. Is this really surprising when there are, in reality, so few actual manufacturers?
There’s also the fact that there are many cowboys still “in town”, products made from isolate, products that are nothing more than hemp seed oil, products that are made at home in someone’s kitchen, I’d hardly call these “leading brands”. They may well shift a few bottles. Indeed we’ve seen many very poor ethanol extractions (from one of the UK’s “leading brands”) that claimed to be a CO2 extraction, but most of the major players in the market are honest and above board.
The figures from CMC are also misleading, suggesting 6 million people were using CBD, when in fact the figures are bastardized from numbers we have put out showing around 1.3 million regular users. Women are more likely to use CBD overall than men with the figures actually being around a 60/40 split, and usage rates are far higher in the over 55’s category. Maybe Mr Liebling’s data breach where he asked an entire illegally compromised group of people medical questions is flawed. But we won’t go into that.
Overall the CBD market does require an industry regulator. TrustCanna IS that regulator, its been discussed at length with the industry, the authorities and, of course, the EU Commission, but what would you expect when we’ve been working on it longer than anyone else?
