Deepak Cyril D’Souza, MBBS, MD, is the Vikram Sodhi ’92 Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. This is a lightly edited excerpt from his interview on the Health & Veritas podcast, episode 170, “Perils of Cannabis and Promise of Psychedelics.” Listen to the whole interview for insights on the biological effects of cannabis use and how researchers are thinking about psychedelics as treatments.
Q+A
Quick Question: Does CBD Actually Do Anything?
Does CBD have real effects on the brain or is it more of a placebo?
Deepak Cyril D’Souza, MBBS, MD: The most interesting compounds in cannabis are Delta-9 THC and cannabidiol, and we refer to them as THC and CBD. Most of the psychoactive effects of cannabis can be attributed to THC. In contrast, CBD doesn’t really produce psychoactive effects, meaning to say you’re not going to get high using CBD or smoking CBD or consuming CBD. But CBD has interesting effects.
I think that in certain models, for example, certain rare forms of epilepsy, there is convincing data that CBD that’s currently commercially available under the brand name Epidiolex has been shown to be efficacious in a very rare form of seizure disorder that occurs in children.
So there’s some data for that. But CBD has been used or tested in so many different disorders that have nothing in common, don’t have any common pathophysiology, which suggests that maybe it’s just having a great placebo effect.
We often think about drugs or the usefulness of drugs as balancing the good effects with the bad effects. So you could have a drug which is a great chemotherapeutic drug, which is used in the treatment of cancer, which may produce really bad side effects. But because it kills this cancer, we are okay with using that drug.
And on the other extreme, you may have a drug that doesn’t produce any harmful effects but also doesn’t produce any beneficial effects. And so one might think about CBD as a drug that doesn’t produce too many bad side effects, but some people wonder whether it does produce any beneficial effects.
The jury is out a little. I can speak about CBD in psychiatry. There has been quite a bit of interest in the use of CBD in the treatment of anxiety disorders and even schizophrenia. But I think the science is just not there as yet to support any efficacy of CBD in at least these two disorders.
Health & Veritas is hosted by Yale School of Medicine’s Howard Forman, MD, MBA, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology).
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