Cannabidiol takes root in India in the time of covid-19

” I started buying it for them too and at one point I understood this was a serious business chance,” states Chandrakant, the founder and director of CBD Shop India, among the country’s very first certified importers and distributors of CBD products. “Today I have actually got about 5,000 regular consumers and we make over 1 lakh in daily sales from our site.”

Thanks to his coach, Chandrakant had stumbled into one of the world’s latest and fastest growing markets at just the correct time. Over the last few years, CBD has gone from being a fringe stoner solution to a mainstream panacea, with proponents claiming that it works in dealing with whatever from chronic discomfort and anxiety to epilepsy and schizophrenia. In 2018, the US food and drug administration authorized the first CBD drug for epilepsy, triggering an even greater rush to bring various CBD products to market. Today, it’s an industry worth $9.3 billion (around 797 crore), according to a report from market research firm Grand View Research study, with CBD products ranging from oils and casts to edibles, appeal products, bath bombs and customer drinks.

In India, too, a small but growing number of individuals swear by CBD’s healing potential. When Chandrakant began CBD Store India, his primary customers consisted of fellow professional athletes, who used it for discomfort management and post-injury healing. “I was shocked when people started calling me up for CBD for cases like arthritis, epilepsy and things like that,” states Chandrakant, adding that one requires a prescription from a registered medical professional in order to buy their products.

The Indian CBD industry is still tiny, which is reasonable because cannabis– the plant, not cannabidiol– continues to be illegal under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Compounds Act,1985 The law prohibits cannabis production, though state governments can grant a licence to cultivate it for industrial or research functions. It was only last year that CBD products made from hemp– a range of the cannabis plant that has less than 0.3%THC, or Tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary psychoactive substance in cannabis– ended up being legal to offer and consume. Domestic production for commercial use is still mainly in the pilot project phase.

Nevertheless, the industry does have one major advantage that might help it grow at an exponential rate– the Ayurveda connection. The marijuana plant is an active ingredient in over 104 conventional medication formulas, a truth that has allowed marijuana entrepreneurs to find a course to the market.

” In Ayurveda, we know cannabis as vijaya and we use it in numerous medicines as an ingredient,” says Piyush Juneja, an Ayurvedic medical professional with a practice in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, who is also on CBD Store India’s panel of medical professionals. “Over the last 6 months, we dealt with at least four-five patients daily as far as CBD products are concerned.

With Ayush (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy) practitioners and academics publicly pushing for the legalization of medical marijuana in 2015, Chandrakant finds himself operating in a progressively crowded area.

In February, Odisha-based marijuana startup HempCann Solutions opened the very first retail marijuana center in Bengaluru, where it sells its licensed Ayurvedic drugs, cannabis-based formulas. Patients can get a medical assessment at the clinic and purchase the items with a prescription. In February, Delhi start-up HempStreet got $1 million in a financing round on the back of its soon-to-be-launched line of Ayurvedic cannabis products. And after that there’s Bombay Hemp Company (Boheco), started in 2013 by seven graduates from the HR College of Commerce and Economics, Mumbai.

Since its inception, Boheco has actually been at the leading edge of efforts to get India to liberalize its marijuana policy to take advantage of a fast-growing international hemp industry. The business currently sells three Ayurveda-based CBD items– two over the counter oils and a THC and CBD oil formula for persistent pain that requires a prescription– and is collaborating with the Institute of Integrated Medicine in Jammu on research study into cannabis-based medicines for cancer, epilepsy and sickle cell anaemia.

” We are still at an extremely early phase of customer outreach but even from a market horizon point of view for such products within this area, we estimate the (CBD wellness) industry to conservatively be worth about $120-150 million,” says Boheco co-founder Jahan Peston Jamas.

Cannabis business owners will have to jump considerable difficulties to get anywhere close to that figure, including the regulatory and legal obstructions and the preconception of the plant’s association with drug use.

” The problem is that within the marijuana neighborhood, there are a great deal of people making claims that CBD can treat anything, without proof,” states Chandrakant. “That results in a lot of scepticism in the medical neighborhood. I likewise think the federal government needs to be actually rigorous so that we can guarantee the quality of our items.”

And before you run off to conjecture of CBD oil and “self-medicate”, Dr Juneja uses a word of care. “If you are taking a concentrated form of CBD, or full-spectrum formulations that use CBD and THC, it is very important that you take them under correct medical guidance and supervision,” he says. “Particularly if you drink or are on allopathic medications. While the adverse effects are very little, they do exist and they can damage you if taken without medical assistance.”

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.