Millions Of Americans Use CBD As A Substitute For Painkillers And Other Medications, Federally Funded Study Shows

About one in three Americans who use CBD say they take it as an alternative or supplement to at least one medication—particularly painkillers—according to a new federally funded study.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego set out to better understand cannabidiol use trends, analyzing nationally representative survey data for the study, which was partially funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Overall, about 35 percent of U.S. adults reported lifetime use of CBD, a non-intoxicating cannabinoid that’s grown in popularity since the federal legalization of hemp and its derivatives in 2018. The 1,008 CBD consumers who participated in the survey were asked about their frequency and methods of use, as well as whether they took the cannabis compound as a substitute or supplement to other traditional drugs.

Among lifetime CBD consumers, 32 percent uses it as a substitute or adjunct for at least one medication, with adjunct usage being more common.

“Millions of US adults use CBD as a substitute and adjunct for a wide range of health conditions.”

For those who reported taking cannabidiol for therapeutic purposes, the “conditions most frequently targeted” were musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders such as joint pain (10.1 percent), psychiatric disorders such as anxiety (7.4 percent) and general disorders or administration site conditions (6.8 percent.

“Frequently replaced or co-administered medications included ibuprofen, Tylenol, and other over-the-counter analgesics,” the study authors said. “Only a small proportion of CBD ever users reported ever having a health problem they believed resulted from CBD use (2.4 percent).”

“CBD use as a substitute or adjunct to medications was common among US adults particularly for pain medications,” they said. “These patterns underscore the need for better evidence and clearer guidance on dosing, product quality, and co-use with other treatments.”

“A key finding is the widespread use of CBD in combination with prescription or over-the-counter medications, highlighting a potential for adverse drug–drug interactions,” the researchers noted.

However, while questions remain as to the risk-benefit analysis of concurrent use of CBD with different drugs, “it needs also to be acknowledged that commonly prescribed medicines, e.g., psychotropics for anxiety or opioids for pain, also have potentially severe adverse effects and risk for forming,” the study says.

“To the extent that CBD, which has very few side effects and likely very low risk of dependence at low to moderate doses, helps a consumer reduce anxiety and decrease or discontinue a medication with more side effects or risk for forming dependence, this might be viewed as a benefit,” it says.

Currently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved a synthetic CBD drug for the treatment of severe epilepsy, “which should not be interpreted as proof of no therapeutic potential for other endpoints, but rather as reflecting in part the difficulty of generating regulatory-grade evidence in a landscape where cannabis has long been federally controlled and clinical research has faced substantial structural barriers,” the authors said.

“Recent federal actions underscore this point,” they said, pointing out that, in December, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal reclassification of marijuana and laying out plans to incorporate CBD coverage under certain federal health insurance programs.

The order “explicitly framed the gap between widespread medical use and limited clinical evidence as leaving patients and clinicians without adequate guidance, and directed agencies to reduce barriers and expand medical marijuana and CBD research, which hopefully will allow for rigorous clinical evaluation of CBD and medical cannabis for promising endpoints,” the study says.

Meanwhile, although CBD was federally legalized during Trump’s first term under the 2018 Farm Bill, the availability of products could be jeopardized under separate legislation the president signed into law last year that included provisions that stakeholders say would effectively eradicate the cannabinoid market by severely restricting THC content.

CBD isolates wouldn’t necessarily be impacted by the law that takes effect in November, but it’s relatively rare to find CBD such trace amounts of THC so as to meet the new federal definition of legal hemp.

With respect to the latest cannabidiol study, it’s far from the only piece of research establishing that people are using marijuana and its constituents as an alternative to other drugs.

To that point, another recent federally funded study, published by the American Medical Association (AMA), added more evidence that marijuana can serve as an effective substitute for opioids in chronic pain treatment.

Other AMA-published research has found that legalizing marijuana for medical or recreational purposes is “significantly associated with reduced opioid use among patients diagnosed with cancer.”

A separate paper published in October similarly found that medical marijuana legalization is “associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing.”

In August, meanwhile, Australian researchers published a study showing that marijuana can serve as an effective substitute for opioids in pain management treatment.

Another study published earlier this year in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review found that, among drug users who experience chronic pain, daily cannabis use was linked to a higher likelihood of quitting the use of opioids—especially among men.

Research published late last year also found that legalizing medical cannabis appeared to significantly reduce monetary payments from opioid manufacturers to doctors who specialize in pain, with authors finding “evidence that this decrease is due to medical marijuana becoming available as a substitute” for prescription painkillers.

Other recent research also showed a decline in fatal opioid overdoses in jurisdictions where marijuana was legalized for adults. That study found a “consistent negative relationship” between legalization and fatal overdoses, with more significant effects in states that legalized cannabis earlier in the opioid crisis. Authors estimated that recreational marijuana legalization “is associated with a decrease of approximately 3.5 deaths per 100,000 individuals.”

“Our findings suggest that broadening recreational marijuana access could help address the opioid epidemic,” that report said. “Previous research largely indicates that marijuana (primarily for medical use) can reduce opioid prescriptions, and we find it may also successfully reduce overdose deaths.”

Another recently published report into prescription opioid use in Utah following the state’s legalization of medical marijuana found that the availability of legal cannabis both reduced opioid use by patients with chronic pain and helped drive down prescription overdose deaths statewide. Overall, results of the study indicated that “cannabis has a substantial role to play in pain management and the reduction of opioid use,” it said.

Scientists Reveal What Types Of Food The Marijuana ‘Munchies’ Make You Crave The Most

Getting the “munchies” after using marijuana isn’t just in your head. It’s a real biological phenomenon that could hold important, real-world implications for people suffering from conditions associated with appetite loss, according to a new study that also identified some of the most commonly desired food items while high.

Researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and the University of Calgary sought out to investigate the well-known cannabis experience, which is often comically portrayed in media as a hunger-inducing side effect that’s coupled with copious consumption of Doritos and other unhealthful snack foods.

While that might be how some people manage the munchies, the appetite stimulation associated with cannabis has the potential to meaningfully help people with serious health conditions, the researchers said in the study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The human clinical trial involved 82 volunteers aged 21 to 62. Participants were randomly assigned to vape either 20 or 40 milligrams of cannabis, or a placebo for the control group, and were assessed to determine what kind of factors might impact the appetite effect. The study also involved similar assessments using a rat model.

“Cannabis acutely and robustly increases energy intake, food motivation, and reward value, irrespective of food type, satiety, food aversion, and gender/sex.”

“There are a lot of different diseases, conditions and disorders associated with wasting syndromes and lack of appetite, and this study really supports the idea that cannabis can be used medicinally to increase appetite in people who have conditions like HIV, AIDS, or who are on chemotherapy,” Carrie Cuttler, a psychology professor at WSU, said in a press release.

Interestingly, the study found that people didn’t universally gravitate toward one type of food option over another. Some participants were inclined to eat carbohydrate-heavy foods, others preferred proteins and some fell closer into the stereotype by choosing fatty snack foods. But there were some common, if unexpected, themes.

“Beef jerky was one of the No. 1 things intoxicated people gravitated toward, which I don’t understand. Honestly, I would have thought chocolate, chips, Rice Krispies treats—things like that,” Cuttler said, adding that water was among the most desired items.

Ryan McLaughlin, a WSU veterinary science professor, said that the “human study found irrespective of body mass index, time of last food consumption, sex or how much cannabis was consumed, human participants who used cannabis during the trial ate significantly more food,.”

The rat-based trial similarly demonstrated that cannabis commonly triggered an appetite response in the animals, which pulled levers to obtain food at a much higher rate compared to the control group.

“The sober animals are kind of like, ‘I’m full. Why do I care?’ They don’t put in any effort at all. They barely work in any capacity to get access to food,” The University of Calgary’s Matthew Hill said. “But you get them stoned again, and even though they’re now full and they’ve eaten, they go right back as if they’re starving.”

“The same thing we saw in the humans we saw in the rats. We kind of thought it would make them want to eat carb-rich foods, but that didn’t seem to be the case. It just seemed to be any food,” he said.

The findings reinforce what’s been established in earlier research into the endocannabinoid system. THC stimulates the hypothalamus and “hijacks that entire system,” McLaughlin said. “So even though you’re not necessarily hungry, THC can stimulate cannabinoid receptors in the brain and make you feel hungry.”

“That’s what really gives us the opportunity to look at whether this is something brain-mediated or gut-mediated, and this generally shows ‘the munchies’ are mediated by the brain,” he said.

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This is far from the only study to look at the relationship between marijuana and appetite.

For example, in 2024, WSU researchers separately published a federally funded study that identified exactly what happens in the brain after using marijuana that causes the munchies. The research, published in Scientific Reports, revealed how cannabis activates a specific cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus region of the brain that stimulates appetite.

A 2019 study separately found that sales of commonly munched on products like ice cream, cookies and chips tend to go up after states legalize cannabis.

Despite that, a 2022 study determined that adult-use legalization is actually associated with decreased levels of obesity despite the fact that cannabis is well-known appetite stimulator.

In 2024, meanwhile, a meta-analysis also found that people who use marijuana are about half as likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

AI Models Like ChatGPT Can Generate ‘Convincingly Realistic’ Psychedelic Experiences When Virtually Dosed, Study Shows

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are surprisingly good at mimicking human psychedelic experiences, according to a new study in which researchers virtually dosed large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT with simulations of drugs like psilocybin, DMT and ayahuasca.

For the study, researchers at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University ran analyses that compared self-reported psychedelic trips from humans—based on more than 1,000 posts in the popular forum Erowid—to AI responses to prompts where they were tasked with essentially role-playing a human using LSD, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca or mescaline.

Five AI models (Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 3.5, ChatGPT-5, Llama-2 70B and Falcon 40B) produced 3,000 narratives about their simulated first-person reports with the psychedelics. Researchers then examined semantic similarities and responses to the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ-30).

Overall, the study concludes that “contemporary LLMs can be ‘dosed’ via text prompts to generate convincingly realistic psychedelic narratives,” as they “simulate the form of altered states without the experiential content.”

Interestingly, the researchers also found that the LLMs produced narratives that were more consistent with human self-reports for certain psychedelics over others—with DMT, psilocybin and mescaline prompts resulting in the closest similarities, LSD showing medium similarity and ayahuasca demonstrating the lowest level of similarity.

Beyond the novelty of the experiment, the researchers said the findings have practical implications, demonstrating the importance of using caution if AI tools are incorporated into human psychedelic experiences (e.g. people taking psychedelics and then relying on AI as a virtual trip sitter).

“Users in altered states may perceive these outputs as empathetic, attuned, or indicative of shared experience,” the study says. “This capability raises significant safety concerns regarding anthropomorphism and the potential for AI to inadvertently amplify distress or delusional ideation in vulnerable users.”

“LLMs can convincingly approximate psychedelic narratives through learned linguistic patterns—but they do so without experiential grounding,” the study says.

In other AI and drug policy research, a study from AAA released last year found that marijuana consumers respond better to anti-impaired driving messaging that’s rooted in “realistic” portrayals of the issue that avoid stoner stereotypes—and the top-ranked message was developed by AI via ChatGPT, rather than through the focus group ideation process.

A separate study found that marijuana breeders may be able to design new strains and speed up their growing cycles by utilizing AI.

Photo elements courtesy of carlosemmaskype and Apollo.