CBD Use Associated With Reduced Tobacco Intake

A question has perplexed cannabis advocates since the dawn of cannabis prohibition – why is tobacco legal and cannabis illegal given how much more harmful tobacco is compared to cannabis?

Worldwide, tobacco use is responsible for killing over 7 million people every year. However, cannabinoids alone have never killed anyone in humanity’s entire recorded history.

This is not to villanize people that consume tobacco. Many tobacco users are victims of deceptive marketing practices and historically loose tobacco industry regulations. It’s also a personal choice as long as second-hand smoke exposure is mitigated.

With that being said, given how many people die annually from tobacco use and that the same cannot be said about cannabis, the findings of a new study demonstrating that CBD may be able to help reduce tobacco intake is a great thing. Below is more information about it via a news release from NORML:

Paris, France: Vaporizing a liquid formulation of CBD is associated with reduced cannabis/tobacco intake, according to data published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

A team of French investigators assessed the impact of vaporized CBD on daily cannabis consumption patterns in a cohort of 20 daily consumers. Nearly all of the subjects in the study smoked cannabis mixed with tobacco in joints. Prior studies have previously demonstrated that CBD administration mitigates smoker’s desire for tobacco cigarettes.

Of the nine patients who completed the 12-week trial, six of them reduced their daily consumption of cannabis/tobacco joints by 50 percent.

Authors concluded: “This research provides evidence in favor of the use of CBD in CUD [patients with cannabis use disorder] … and illustrates the interest of proposing an addictological intervention targeting at the same time tobacco and cannabis dependence in users who are co-consumers. … A double-blind, randomized, multi-center, placebo-controlled clinical trial is still needed to assess the efficacy of inhaled CBD in CUD.”

CBD consumption has previously been associated with reductions in alcohol intake as well as reductions in cue-induced cravings and anxiety in subjects with a history of heroin use.

Full text of the study, “Efficacy of inhaled cannabidiol in cannabis use disorder: the pilot study Cannavap,” appears in Frontiers in Psychiatry.