We recently sent a bunch of CBD products to a lab to test them for accuracy, value, and honesty. Eight of the 65 CBD products are sold on Amazon.com: R+R Medicinals, Populum, Lazarus Naturals, Kushly, NanoLabs, Naturefine, Restorative Botanicals, and Wise Help. All eight products contained CBD.
Five of the eight products we tested had cannabinoid levels within 12% of those suggested on their labels, which is pretty good.
Our lab results found that the 1,000 mg bottle of R+R Medicinals contained 1,070 mg of CBD. However, their label did not specify if the milligrams were total cannabinoid or total CBD amounts. The bottle contained a total of 1,215 mg of cannabinoids (a 21.5% difference from the label).
Two of the eight bottles contained less than 4% of the cannabinoids suggested by their label. Naturefine’s Flavored Hemp contained less than 31 mg of cannabinoids in their 1000 mg bottle. Naturefine also claimed that their product was “THC free” but tested positive for THC. Wise Help, Amazon’s “Top selected” CBD Oil, contained about 2 mg of cannabinoids in their 3,000 mg bottle.
LazarusNaturals, RestorativeBotanicals, and R+R Medicinals were all under 5 cents per mg of CBD, which is excellent. The problem with purchasing on Amazon is that you don't know if the brand containsCBD until you test it.
Six of the eight products on Amazon contained THC. For example, R+R Medicinals tested for over 63 mg of THC. For reference, people have testedTHC positive from doses as low as 0.39 mg per day, and THC side effects, such as being “high” or impaired, may start as low as 2 mg. CBD products on Amazon don’t list CBD or THC on the label and that leaves some consumers with safety, legal, and employment risks.
Yes and no. Amazon officially does not allow the sale of products that contain CBD or THC. However, a search onAmazon for “CBD” will display over 10,000 products. Amazon even has a “CBD Oils” page for “Top Selected Products and Reviews.”
CBD companies can't label their products as containing CBD or THC on Amazon. Instead, they will use terms such as full-spectrum, whole plant, hemp extract, hemp leaves, hemp flower, hemp oil, entourage effect, phytocannabinoids, or phytonutrients. It seems that some of the Amazon products that contain the word “CBD” get kicked off, only to reappear as a new product with branding and marketing that does not include the word CBD.
Many CBD companies claim that the hemp oil is from the"leaves" or "flower" of the hemp plant to let customers know that the product is not just a hemp seed oil. Hemp seeds and stalks carry little-to-no CBD or THC.
Six out of the eight products that we tested had significant amounts of CBD. There’s probably more.
R+R Medicinals has 1,300 reviews for the CBD product that we purchased. Although Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers, some Amazon affiliates estimate that they receive under 5 reviews for every 100 products sold. By that calculation, the single R+R Medicinals CBD product that we purchased for $44.99 has likely generated well over $1 million in revenue.
The entire hemp CBD market was an estimated $600 million in 2018. Amazon’s CBD category has over 10,000 products and that's not including all theCBD products that have been sold before being removed from the market. Amazon could actually be the largest retailer of CBD products, even though they don’t officially sell CBD. However, it’s impossible to know without official sales figures and testing of all the products in the CBD category on Amazon. To make things even more difficult, many CBD products are removed from Amazon and new potential CBD products are added every day.
Jeremy is a former firefighter turned health writer. He is a co-founder of CBD Examine and migrainekey.com, where he pioneered CBD and migraine research. His latest book, Hemp for Migraine, was the largest collection of peer-reviewed research relating to CBD, cannabinoids, and migraine relief.
