Bad trip alert. Health authorities sound the alarm after several hundred cases of poisoning related to CBD consumption for almost two years. Four openwork were enough for Nicolas (name changed) to feel the unwanted effects.
“I feel that I am taking off in a phenomenal way!” He tells BFMTV. “With altered thoughts, increase in heart rate, close to hard drugs.”
What I thought was CBD was actually a synthetic cannabinoid, a molecule called “alternative” and illegal that can be sprayed on CBD flowers or incorporated into processed products such as gummies, oils or e-liquids. And the danger to health is important: artificial cannabinoid is up to 100 times more powerful than natural CBD.
A network of traffickers attacks the European market
Sold in almost 2,000 stores and watertight in France, the CBD is naturally present at the cannabis plant and is not considered narcotic or a psychotropic drug.
However, the products that contain the molecule also contain other “substances, rarely identified in the container, whose consumption causes a significant increase in poisoning,” the National Medicine Safety Agency (ANSM) and ANSES warned since June.
Given this outbreak of “bad trips”, sellers and laboratories try to detect by controls the dangerous artificial substance. In the SCL of Paris a dozen prohibited molecules are detected every year. “It is huge because it is a chemist capable of creating new molecules, which is not common,” explains scientist Frédéric Barozzi.
Police are also on alert. In the sight: foreign traffic networks. “They sent their chemical engineers to Europe to begin to penetrate little by little in the European consumer market,” says the director of Customs Services, Corinne Cléostrate.
In France, 10% of adults claimed to have consumed CBD in 2022, according to Public Health France.
Source: BFM TV
