The combination of cannabis with regular cancer therapies is therefore certainly not always safe. Cancer patients who use cannabis oil, either 10% cbd oil uk, in addition to their regular therapy can best discuss this with their oncologist, so that they can assess safety and side effects can be recognized more easily.
CBD versus THC
However, estimating the safety of the various products available on the market is no easy task. CBD oil, the cannabis oil without THC, appears to be the most harmless for the time being, while there are higher safety risks with cannabis oil containing THC. High concentrations of THC can be better avoided for safety reasons. The notorious ‘Rick Simpson oil’ (see more about RS itself below), also popularly abbreviated as RSO, is illegal because of the high content of 50 to 60% THC.
- It seems to be popular to make this weed oil yourself. Many self-made recipes can be found on the internet. The ratio of THC to CBD can vary enormously between the legal and, in particular, the illegal products that are offered on the internet – it is often unclear or impossible to know what THC and CBD levels are in these products.
- Moreover, research by the editors of the Radar consumer program shows that the labels on the CBD oil products are often incorrect: for example, instead of 10% CBD it only contains 1%, or even nothing at all. What also occurs is that there is still THC (the psychoactive substance from cannabis) in the CBD oil – in some of the cases investigated it contained even more THC than CBD, Radar discovered .
- This is supported by the National Poisons Information Center (NVIC) that signaled an increasing number of poisoning after taking CBD oil last year, with complaints such as hallucinations that do not fit products that would not contain THC.
Life threatening
This has already led to life-threatening situations in cancer patients who bought products of unknown quality and with an unknown content ‘on the street’. For example, a case is described of a lung cancer patient who went into a coma within a few hours of taking the cannabis extract.
The amount of CBD and THC that is absorbed into the body from the oil is highly variable when administered orally. So how much active substance enters the body can vary per day. As is true for other plant or herbal extracts, there are many thousands of active substances in cannabis oil, much more than just THC or CBD. The safety of these substances is as yet unknown; however, they can play a role in side effects.
How many of these other active substances from the cannabis plant come with the oil extraction are unknown and will vary from product to product. In addition, pesticides used in the cultivation of cannabis in highly concentrated form may end up in cannabis extracts. Dangerous solvents used in the extraction process may also end up in the oil.
In short, quality and safety controls are virtually impossible with this kind of natural product. This calls for more research into more controllable, single, preparations or synthetic cannabinoids, in short products that are pure and controllable in content of the active substance. Purified or synthetic cannabinoids are therefore used in most laboratory studies on anticancer activity; no simple extracts of cannabis plants.
