Can CBD help you quit smoking cigarettes?

Smoking cigarettes is one of the worst and most addictive habits that kills millions of people worldwide. The number worldwide estimates that 7 million people die each year from diseases related to tobacco usage. People who have formed these addictions over years or decades often try to quit over and over again. Some are able to finally beat the habit and others continue on the cycle of quitting and starting, quitting and starting. 

There are a plethora of options currently for smokers to turn to in order to reduce smoking or quit all together such as:

• Prescription Drugs: such as zyban, which often come with their own undesired side effects.
• Nicotine Patch
• Nicotine Gum
• Hypnosis
• Cold Turkey
• Vaping
• Oral Nicotine Sprays

From the above list you can see that over half of those options are still giving you the nicotine which is what your body is most addicted to and removing the thing that really kills you which is the tobacco. All of these nicotine replacement options are tobacco harm reduction tools which ultimately a next step is needed further on.

So saying all that, this leads us to our topic at hand which is the question "can CBD products help me quit smoking?". 

Over the years there have been some studies done on addictive behaviors and CBD in general and also small studies done to specifically look at CBD as a quitting smoking aid. 

A study done in 2013 (ref: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23685330/ ) was conducted as a pilot and randomised double blind placebo controlled study. They wanted to see what affects giving CBD to smokers would be. Keep in mind these people already had a desire to quit smoking which is always the first step. 24 smokers all together were randomized and 12 of them giving a placebo and the other 12 of them given a CBD inhaler for a one week period. They were told to user the inhaler when felt the urge to smoke a cigarette. Over that week of treatment iwth the CBD inhaler those treated significantly reduced the number of cigarettes smoked by 40%. The people treated with the placebo showed no differences in cigarettes smoked. That preliminary data, combined with the strong preclinical rationale for use of this compound suggested CBD to be a potential treatment for nicotine addiction. 

This was only a single study done specifically on nicotine but it does show the potential that CBD has for many ailments or even addictions such as nicotine.

In 2015 there was an additional review done which was called "Cannabidiol as a intervention for Addictive Behaviors: A systematic Review of Evidence."

After looking through medical databases reviewing CBD and addictions they identified about 14 separate studies in this review regarding CBD and addictions.  The conclusions stated that overall the emerging data is pretty limited and while it's far from being conclusive it shows much promise and further studies and trials need to be done. This is true of nicotine addiction but also shows great promise with opidiod addictions.

If you want to try quitting smoking, using a CBD Canada CBD Vape Pen might be a great first step.

We hope this article gave you a little more references to go based on and hopefully it helps someone looking to give CBD a try for quitting smoking.