This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 29th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Since the Farm Bill passed earlier this year, hemp has been legalized.

One chemical you can derive from hemp is

CBD. What is it? What do we know about it? Is it a miracle drug or a marketing scam?

Mike Riggs of Reason magazine says it's both. We spoke earlier this month.

You can make CBD now and you can sort of possess CBD now under federal law.

It's not super clear the language in the Farm Bill was not, you know,

made no effort to say, like,

and here's how we're going to treat CBD

like holistically going forward. It was basically just like you won't get in trouble with the DEA anymore for this.

Okay, so as I said before the Wild West, there are lots of different producers of it. The quality of it varies widely whether it's you know essentially, essentially hemp oil, quote unquote,

versus something that may contain no CBD at all.

So what do we know about the actual effects of CBD thus far?

So the thing we know the most about is its effect on people with epilepsy and who experienced seizures and it has some sort of

anti-seizure effect. I'm not super familiar with the mechanism of action which

is like the explanation for what's happening in the body that stops the seizures,

but randomly controlled clinical trials and peer-reviewed research shows that it does work for seizures,

which is why the first CBD drug that the FDA approved was for a form of treatment resistant epilepsy

that affects children.

And there's two different kinds that are really bad.

They affect babies and toddlers and left untreated, they're generally fatal.

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