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CBD is “safe and tolerable” in healthy adults and should be available without a prescription, a panel of scientists recommended to Canada’s top health regulator Thursday.
The endorsement comes three years after Health Canada first appointed a team of experts to consider whether CBD should be sold by mainstream retailers and not limited to adult-use cannabis stores or by doctor’s recommendation.
The experts, a nine-member panel formally called the Science Advisory Committee on Health Products Containing Cannabis, concluded that CBD is “safe and tolerable for short-term use (a maximum of 30 days) at doses from 20 milligrams per day to a maximum dose of 200 mg/day.”
Health Canada is not bound by Thursday’s recommendation and has no deadline to act on it.
But the recommendation could open an enormous new market for CBD.
Paul Pedersen, CEO of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Nextleaf, which makes CBD and THC extracts for other manufacturers, estimates Canada’s current illicit CBD market to be worth about $4 billion a year.
He envisions such sales moving into Canadian grocery and drug stores alongside other dietary supplements.
