The cannabinoids may work better together for some conditions, especially when pain is a factor. What about the uncertainties over whether CBD works for a given illness? Jacobson didn’t necessarily see the lack of evidence of effectiveness as a problem. When it comes to diseases like intractable epilepsy, she said, doctors often do their own experimenting.

Drugs are typically developed in the lab and go through trials before reaching patients. But in the case of Epidiolex, two mothers of epileptic children experimented on their own sons and then helped push a version of what they discovered into the F.D.A. pipeline. “In the modern era, it’s certainly the most striking example of a drug that has gone from patient use to drug development,” Ken Mackie, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, told me. Because so many people already use cannabis and think it helps, patients might be, in effect, pioneering new uses through self-experimentation.

They try standard treatments first, but when those fail, as they https://cbdgummiesbest.com/ did in Ben and Sam’s cases, they turn to drugs that might not be approved for epilepsy or even for children. Some of these drugs might cause severe side effects, including fits of rage or sedation so extreme that, as one mother described it to me, “the light goes out” in a child’s eyes. Elizabeth Thiele, the epileptologist at Harvard, says that some children, for reasons that aren’t clear, undergo mood changes on some nonprescription CBD oils.

There are other examples of a single drug being able to help meliorate a variety of conditions. Aspirin has its own downsides — an elevated risk of bleeding, for instance — but like CBD, its broad utility may be partly explained by its anti-inflammatory effects.

(These issues might be caused by different cannabinoids or terpenes, another type of biologically active molecule produced by plants.) CBD can also interfere with how quickly the body breaks down other medications. Where Jacobson and Nussenbaum saw their role as helping a cannabis-derived drug get F.D.A. approval, Figi focused on legislation, becoming a kind of CBD ambassador. She testified before State Legislatures and helped draft a 2017 House bill that, if it hadn’t died, would have legalized CBD nationally.