Happy Friday!
On a recent spring evening in Los Angeles, I gathered with about 30 women at the San Vicente Bungalows—a private West Hollywood club where actors like Armie Hammer read scripts in the courtyard and annual dues run upwards of $4,000. After sunset glasses of rosé and champagne, we retired to a small upstairs room where a long table was set with copious flowers and pewter candlesticks.
The occasion was not a celebrity’s birthday, a film’s premiere, or even the launch of a new fashion brand. Rather, the guest of honor was a mysterious molecule: cannabidiol, or, as many of us know it, CBD.
The event’s hosts, Ashley Lewis and Nandita Khanna, met one another at Goop, where they both worked between 2016 and 2018. Lewis left Goop to start Fleur Marché, an online “cannabis apothecary” selling CBD-enhanced everything from $12 patches for menstrual relief to $110 sleep tinctures. Khanna is now the editorial director for Feals, a company that sells CBD tinctures the way Casper does mattresses—direct-to-consumer, with Instagram-friendly images of satisfied customers in striped shirts. The event, which would include a panel discussion featuring representatives from three CBD beauty brands, was the first in a series to bring together CBD brands and curious consumers.
Those consumers are many. Across the US—and around the world—believers are rubbing CBD balm onto their aching joints, dropping CBD tinctures under tired tongues, popping CBD gummies, puffing on CBD-oil-filled vaporizers, and feeding Fido CBD-laced dog treats. Earlier this year, Kim Kardashian threw a “CBD-themed” baby shower and the fast food chain Carl’s Jr. topped a burger with “CBD-infused Santa Fe sauce.” Analysts estimate the US market for CBD—worth several hundred million dollars in 2018—will surpass $20 billion by 2022.
At the intersection of the $4 trillion wellness industrial complex, the $17 billion legal cannabis industry, and the anxiety epidemic crippling America sits a little bottle of CBD oil.
Ask me about CBD. I know all this because I spent much of this spring steeped in cannibidiol (figuratively), reporting a Quartz field guide on the CBD boom. These guides are deep dives into timely topics impacting the global economy—past examples include how sneakers took over fashion, the rise of microinfluencers, and the battery revolution challenging Big Oil.
If you want to dive in with me, you can consume the whole darn thing—including an extensive primer on the forces behind the CBD boom, and Dan Kopf’s gallery of CBD-adjacent products getting the “Rosé All Day” treatment—with a Quartz premium membership. There are all kinds of other goodies that come with access, which you can get for $15/month, $99/year, or, for commitment-phobes, free with a seven-day trial.
No literally, ask me. If you’re already a member, and reading this before 11am ET, you can join me and Quartz membership editor Sam Grobart on a live video conference call (!) about CBD by clicking this link or dialing in at +1 408 740 7256 in the US or +44 203 608 5256 in the UK and using the access code 722 994 440.
Back to our originally scheduled programming.
So what even is CBD? CBD stands for cannabidiol, which every single person I interviewed pronounced differently. It’s one of many chemical compounds in a class called “cannabinoids” that naturally occur in cannabis plants.
Everyone’s new favorite cannabinoid is, at its core, just a molecule. It interacts with a network of neurotransmitters in our brains and nervous systems called the endocannabinoid system, which researchers hypothesize acts as a powerful “dimmer switch,” helping modulate brain activity and mood. Beyond that, CBD may benefit our bones and immune systems and work throughout the body as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant.
Why are we so hyped on it? Because we’re anxious as hell! And preclinical trials suggest CBD could help.
In one bonkers and somewhat upsetting 2012 study, scientists observed the behavior of mice, some of which were pre-treated with CBD, after a wild boa constrictor was introduced to an “arena” with them. Don’t worry: “In no case did a snake eat an experimental mouse.” But the CBD-treated mice did exhibit fewer “panic-like” responses, such as freezing, urinating, or attempting an “explosive escape” when faced with the snake. Researchers concluded the CBD-treated mice were experiencing less fear than those who got the placebo, despite a truly terrifying scenario. So there’s that.
One lady who knows a lot about the CBD market is Vivien Azer, a managing director at the financial firm Cowen and Company, and arguably the OG of Wall Street cannabis analysts. She talked to me about why she thinks the CBD craze is here to stay.
QZ: What is the bull case for CBD?
VA: That we live in an increasingly busy world. Everybody has anxiety and this is a great solution for that.
And what’s the bear case?
That some kind of research comes out that there are unintended consequences that consumers had not been made aware of because there wasn’t adequate science, i.e. side effects.
What’s most exciting to you about CBD?
That it could very well have the potential to ultimately help de-stigmatize kind of the broader cannabis category.
About that destigmatization.
Azer is right—CBD does have the potential to de-stigmatize the broader cannabis category—but many of the brands marketing it are working hard to distance their products from the plant altogether.
“Removing the word ‘cannabis’ from ‘CBD’ is a key to the success of CBD as a branded space,” Paul Earle, a branding expert who teaches corporate innovation at Kellogg, told me. “I wouldn’t lean in too hard on leaves, for example, as visual icons.” Earle knows how to do this; he was on the founding team at Angel’s Envy (now owned by Bacardi), one of the bourbon brands that helped reinvigorate the category.
When it comes to weed, there’s a lot of stigma to undo, thanks in large part to the US War on Drugs, which had its roots in decades of racist and politically motivated campaigns. Some worry that in distancing CBD brands from cannabis—i.e. positioning a product in opposition to it, or ignoring its existence altogether—entrepreneurs are actually reinforcing the stigmas that still plague the plant.
“The way CBD is marketed—in a way where it’s so detached from the plant, the activism, and the movement—positions the smoking of cannabis as bad,” Kimberly Dillon, a marketing exec-turned-consultant, wrote for AdWeek in April. “CBD is just a touch naughty, but THC—that’s outright bad. As a result, every brand is tripping over themselves to offer wealthy soccer moms a CBD gummy.”
In an odd twist, big businesses are embracing transparency, rather than the indie players one might expect. At Cannes Lions last week, Julie Baker, the marketing director for Epidiolex—the first cannabis-derived drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—said she thinks CBD’s mass appeal has been detrimental to the plant’s acceptance as serious medicine, and that the beginning of a backlash is underway.
To combat any shadiness, Epidiolex is using a virtual-reality experience to bring doctors inside sprawling grow-houses with acres of cannabis and laboratories where Epidiolex’s extracts are made and tested. Says Baker, “Nothing engenders trust like transparency.”
Have a great weekend!
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Are you using CBD? One of the interesting aspects of this stuff is the self-experimentation that’s underway in absence of extensive research or regulation. Have you found something that works for you? If so, what? How much, how often? And how did you get there? Please reply and let me know!