CBD oil has gained much popularity recently, owing to the ever-increasing number of studies on its efficacy being released every year and the ever-growing users being benefited from its use.
Among the different routes of administration of this substance, vaping has proved to be a preferred option among many, thanks to its fast action and enjoyable experience. Besides, people who were into smoking and doing drugs have also been benefited from its use, apart from people suffering from chronic pain, inflammation, insomnia, depression, and anxiety, among other conditions.
People don’t just vape pure CBD juices, they also vape juices that contain certain essential oils, terpenes, waxes, and other nicotine-free juices. Some CBD vape juices also contain certain substances that can get you high, like THC.
It is totally up to the user to decide on how he or she wants to use CBD. As a consumer, we need to be careful and wary of anything and everything we put into our body. Whether or not you’ll get high or get the desired effects of CBD depends entirely on the user.
What effects can you expect to have after vaping CBD juice?
CBD has quite a few health benefits. However, there are no one-size-fits-all rules for it. CBD’s effects vary from person to person. 10mg of CBD will have varying effects on different people. For that, one needs to find the right dosage. You can also get an estimate on how much CBD to vape for a person with a specific weight, age, and severity of the condition, by measuring it on a CBD Calculator.
Nevertheless, the general effects of CBD vaping are more or less the same as using CBD in any form, except for a few risk factors that vaping generally carries.
Conditions for which Vaping CBD is an excellent choice
While there are quite a few conditions that CBD is effective in combating or managing, people generally vape CBD for the following issues:
- Chronic Pain [1]
- Inflammation [1]
- Insomnia [2]
- Anxiety & Depression [2, 3]
While these health issues are usually nothing more than symptoms associated with much larger health problems or conditions, these issues make life more difficult. People usually choose to vape over other options of administering CBD as it gives them quick action relief. Now, the question is how does vaping CBD offer quick relief?
Reasons why “Vaping” is a better method of using CBD
Vaping CBD comes with quite a lot of benefits. While we already know about the various health benefits of CBD, vaping it has quite a few advantages, like:
- Easy and fast absorption, as it enters your bloodstream right away through your lungs.
- Higher bioavailability, hence a little CBD goes a long way!
- No wastage due to metabolism. CBD doesn’t have to travel through the digestive system as in edibles.
- Don’t have to taste the hempy taste of CBD oil in your mouth, i.e. if you don’t like it.
- Systemic administration, hence useful for the treatment of multiple problems at one go
- Helps kick the habit of smoking, as vaping feels almost like smoking (need to smoke is part nicotine-craving, part oral-fixation).
- Convenient to use
However, it is best to complement it with other forms of CBD products, as its effects wear off quite easily and faster than other forms of CBD products like tinctures, edibles, etc.
It’s important to know that vape devices have to reach a temperature as high as 210°C to 230°C vaporize CBD oils. Overheating can have both unpleasant experiences and bad impact on health. So make sure to buy a good vape pen or vaping kit to maintain the right temperature for a pleasurable experience.
Can CBD vape juice make you high?
No, CBD vape juices produced from industrial hemp-derived oil does NOT make you high. However, vape juice made from whole-plant extracts from marijuana or other strains of cannabis that don’t fall under the industrial hemp category can.
What makes you high? It is definitely NOT CBD. It is THC, which is sometimes found in CBD oils and vape juices. Unlike CBD, THC is a psychoactive chemical component of cannabis plants that produce hallucinatory or mind-altering effects on the human body.
Most CBD vape juices these days, whether you buy them online or from an offline store, does not contain THC. They are made from CBD isolates, which are devoid of any other chemical component other than Cannabidiol.
Even if you were to make CBD vape juice at home by following recipes online, you’d notice that you are advised to buy CBD isolate powder from the store and mix it with terpenes and/or thinning agents or oils to make your CBD vape juice.
Several readymade vape juices available in the market mention zero-THC, even while mentioning full-spectrum CBD extract. These are actually full-spectrum (or whole-plant) extracts that are treated to remove THC.
However, if the label mentions full-spectrum CBD vape juice, without mentioning zero-THC, you can be sure it is made from whole-plant extracts that include THC in its normal proportion.
If the CBD oil is extracted from industrial hemp, the THC content will be lower than 0.3% (by weight), which is both permissible by law and also does not make you high. It would take at least 0.6 mg of THC to make you feel a bit high.
In fact, a little bit of THC can enhance the effects of CBD, in what we have come to know as the “Entourage Effect”. THC in CBD oil has been particularly found to be effective in managing chronic pain and neuropathic pain, besides inhibiting nerve damage, especially caused by cancer or chemotherapy [4].
While CBD does not give you the kind of high THC does, a user can still experience a discernible effect after vaping CBD. It is something called a “body high” that relaxes your body and makes all of your pain go away, allowing you to sleep better and feel fresh and rejuvenated the day later.
However, THC causes a “head high” that makes you feel trippy, love everything you see, touch or hear, feel lost in the glitter of a dress or even find a plain white wall very engaging. Things would seem to be vivid and the feelings towards them intense; in other words, “head high” is when your perception of your environment gets detached from reality, or rather your reality gets distorted.
While a person can definitely overdose on THC, one cannot overdose on CBD. You would need to ingest at least 20,000 mg of CBD at one go for it to turn toxic. Doses up to 1,500 mg [5] per day are easily tolerated by all with no serious side effects.
Will you test positive on a drug test after Vaping CBD juice?
Probably not! Drug tests look for THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) and not CBD (cannabidiol).
While up to 0.3% THC (by weight) is legally permissible, according to some scientists, you would need to take at least 0.6 mg of THC per day at the standard 50 ng/mL cutoff point to fail a drug test [6]. You can safely ingest up to 0.45 mg of THC oil a day without being tested positive on a drug test.
However, there is the possibility of getting a false positive. CBD is, as you all know, a cannabis-extracted chemical compound, which can still have traces of THC (in both its active and inactive form), even after an innumerable number of purification, screening, and testing processes. Moreover, if you give yourself a high enough dose of full-spectrum CBD vape oil, you may end up with a high enough dose of THC in your system as well. Alternatively, if you had used THC-rich CBD oil very recently, like a few hours earlier or the night before, you may fail the drug test.
If you want to make sure you don’t end up red-faced on a drug test, make sure to:
- Avoid using marijuana-derived CBD extract
- Avoid using full-spectrum CBD juice
- Always look for lab test results and make sure the THC level is well below the permissible limits, or even better, zero.
- Only buy from trusted sources. Trust only the best, well-established, well-reviewed brands.
Parting Thoughts
CBD vape juices are generally safe. They do not make you high unless the percentage of THC in the vape juice is too high (at least 0.6% by weight), which in any case is not permissible by law.
So buy from reputed brands, check to see if they are CBD isolates or broad-spectrum extracts, and avoid using products sourced from cannabis extracts other than industrial-grade hemp (which is the only strain of cannabis that has been legalized in America).
Flip Side To Vaping CBD: There are still some disadvantages to vaping CBD instead of using it in other forms. For instance, many people were hospitalized last year with complaints of pulmonary issues, after vaping CBD juice. Other symptoms include headaches, vomiting, cough, breathlessness, chest pain, fatigue, fever, diarrhea, disorientation, loss of consciousness, and seizures.
CBD NOT At Fault: However, it has been observed that these symptoms were mostly caused by certain ingredients in CBD vape juices other than CBD, like carrier oils, thinning agents, other additives, other cannabinoids, etc.which may cause congestion and inflammation of the lungs and air passages, headaches, nausea, hallucinations, fatigue, fever, etc.
Look At Other Options of Using CBD: While CBD vape juices do not make you high, per se, there are many other viable modes of using CBD. You can choose CBD tinctures (used sublingually) or CBD-infused edibles and capsules (consumed orally and metabolized in the stomach). Nonetheless, a lot of smokers trying to quit, have benefited from vaping CBD, as it offers an easy and smooth transition.
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Research
- Cannabinoid Delivery Systems for Pain and Inflammation Treatment; Molecules; September 27, 2018; Natascia Bruni, Carlo Della Pepa, Simonetta Oliaro-Bosso, Enrica Pessione, Daniela Gastaldi, and Franco Dosio; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6222489/
- Cannabidiol in Anxiety and Sleep: A Large Case Series; The Permanente Journal; January 7, 2019; Scott Shannon, MD, Nicole Lewis, ND, Heather Lee, PA-C, and Shannon Hughes, PhD; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6326553/
- Antidepressant-like and anxiolytic-like effects of cannabidiol: a chemical compound of Cannabis sativa; CNS & Neurological Disorders Drug Targets; 2014; de Mello Schier AR, de Oliveira Ribeiro NP, Coutinho DS, Machado S, Arias-Carrión O, Crippa JA, Zuardi AW, Nardi AE, Silva AC; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24923339
- Cannabinoids in the management of difficult to treat pain; Therapeutics & Clinical Risk Management; February 2008; Ethan B Russo; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2503660/
An Update on Safety and Side Effects of Cannabidiol: A Review of Clinical Data and Relevant Animal Studies; Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research; June 1, 2017; Kerstin Iffland, and Franjo Grotenhermen; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5569602/
