On the Stunt-Marketing of CBD

About 20 years ago, in the aisles of the El Cerrito Natural Grocery store, I confronted the full depth of how shameless some peddlers of health elixirs can be. I turned a corner, my basket full of fresh fruits and veggies and maybe an Amy’s pizza, and was confronted by a display table loaded with a new brand of potato chips. On the packages was emblazoned the label, "Contains Gingko Biloba." Leaving aside the perverseness of marketing a purported memory aid by adding it to a product loaded with brain sludge in the form of salt, sugar, and fat, the product left me wondering what the point was. If people wanted to try to improve their memory with an herbal extract, why would they need, or want, to ingest it by munching potato chips? The extract itself — pure, unadulterated, standardized — was readily available. Then I realized: gingko (then very popular) was seen as "healthy," and people were buying the chips in a "natural foods" store. That made it easier for many of them to rationalize taking home a greasy sack of carbo-crisps. (Note: El Cerrito Natural Grocery was and is a fine store. But all such stores have to play this game, sadly). The same kind of thing is happening now with CBD: cannabidiol, a component of the cannabis plant that doesn’t get you high, but affords at least some, and possibly many, health benefits (it’s shown to be effective for certain kinds of seizures, and there is fairly solid evidence that it can relieve chronic pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, and other maladies). Name a food or beverage category, and someone, somewhere, is selling a "CBD" version of it. It’s in soda pop, cake mix, breakfast cereals, and even hamburgers. And, yes, it’s in potato chips. An outfit […]

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