CBD is evolving at a breakneck speed. An industry that was not on most analysts’ radars just a few years ago is projected to earn around $5.7 billion in the US this year—a nearly tenfold increase since 2018. Those numbers are pushing regulators and researchers to keep up, so the news is coming fast and furious. Here are some resources to help you continue following the rapidly unfolding story of CBD.
Cannabis news is a category unto itself, with publications including Marijuana Business Daily, Cannabis Wire, Marijuana Moment, and Hemp Industry Daily covering the business in addition to the mainstream media. For a daily roundup, I like Mona Zhang‘s email newsletter Word on the Tree.
For deeper business analysis, The Brightfield Group specializes in the CBD and cannabis markets in the US, as do New Frontier Data and BDS Analytics. (Those figures up top come from Brightfield.) BDS also has a new tool (which I have not tried) specifically for monitoring the CBD market. The financial firm Cowen and Company was the first major Wall Street player to cover cannabis by a long-shot, as you may know from our Q&A with managing director and senior research analyst Vivien Cowen—arguably the OG of cannabis analysts. Cowen’s “Collective View of CBD” report is especially illuminating.
To keep up with the ever-changing legal landscape, the lawyers of the firm Harris Bricken explore the legal aspects of developing news stories—the FDA, the Farm Bill, social equity, etc.—which they write about on their Canna Law Blog. US Hemp Roundtable, an industry trade group, also follows the news stories affecting its stakeholders. For news and advocacy for safe and legal cannabis access, NORML is fairly comprehensive in the US.
New scientific studies are coming out all the time. For a good background on cannabis research, check out the 2006 article “Cannabinoid pharmacology: the first 66 years,” published by the British Journal of Pharmacology. For an update, see the World Health Organization’s Critical Review Report of Cannabidiol (pdf). For some of the most interesting preclinical trials on CBD’s most popular use cases, several studies are linked to from this story I wrote in April. The UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative is a great resource, and its director Ziva Cooper often tweets her perspective on cannabis science in the news. And though it’s hardly unbiased, Leafly stays on top of cannabis-related science news.