Cannabidiol, or CBD, as it’s better known, was once only a concern of the most tiresome of stoners.
This explosion in popularity can be traced back, in the UK at least, to 2016, when the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency ruled that products containing cannabidiol used for medical purposes had to be classified as a medicine.
A broader factor, says Saoirse O’Sullivan, a pharmacology professor and consultant, has been the wider acceptance of cannabis as a medicinal product, with a number of countries legalising its use with a prescription.
Colorado-based company Vantage Hemp is one of the key suppliers to the UK market.
It’s where farmers drop off the green needles of the hemp flower – “the biomass” in Utkhede’s words – in huge sacks: anywhere from 10 to 52 bags, depending on the size of the truck.
These all give an insight into the life of the biomass before it reached the factory, explains Utkhede: pesticides tell you how it was grown; microbial tests tell you how it was stored; heavy metals tell you where it was from, because each growing region has a particular heavy metal profile.
The next step is called decarboxylation: the biomass is heated in what is essentially a commercial oven to trigger a chemical change.
After further testing, the biomass is fed into giant “extraction socks.” “We don’t put loose biomass into our extraction systems because it’s messy, and it results in a mess in our extraction area,” explains Utkhede.
This crude extract then goes through a process called ‘winterization’: it’s heated up until it’s liquified, injected into a tank that contains methanol, heated until it dissolves, then chilled to minus 20 degrees Celsius.
The solution is filtrated again, then the methanol is evaporated off – it’s a ten to one ratio of methanol to oil – leaving behind full-spectrum oil: one of Vantage’s three main products.
Now the oil can be distilled, through a system that uses high temperature and very high vacuum to evaporate the oil and then recondense it.
After the final crystallization process, in which everything that isn’t CBD is purged, you’re left with a final, off white-power, CBD isolate.
Utkhede emphasizes that Vantage is not just for food supplements.
This distinction is important because it pertains to current debates surrounding CBD, explains Sumnall.
“There is growing evidence of the therapeutic benefits of CBD in a range of disease through randomized controlled trials ,” agrees O’Sullivan.
Their popularity has largely been driven by clever marketing, and an implicit association with medical practices.
The UK is one of the strictest regulators of the claims: the classification of CBD as a novel food means that the producers of CBD products need to make a novel food application that requires some data on their products.
“You would think that with this massive income, and this massive interest there would be research into the effects and the efficacy against some of the claims which are provided by these high street products, and that is not emerging,” Sumnall says.