CBD, CBG, CBN and CBDA: the whole plant family

Most explanations of cannabinoids are lists, and a list explains nothing. The plant builds all of these compounds from a single precursor, in a fixed order — and once you know the order, the practical questions answer themselves.

Why CBG costs several times more. Why raw cannabis is not intoxicating. Why old material contains more CBN. Why “raw” on a label means something different from “decarboxylated”, and why that difference can inflate the number printed on the front. All the same diagram.

This page is the long version. It covers every cannabinoid you are likely to meet on a label, how to read the lab report that proves what is in the bottle, and the arithmetic that lets you compare two products honestly.

The family tree

The plant makes CBGA. Three enzymes convert it into three acid forms — THCA, CBDA, CBCA. Whatever no enzyme reaches stays CBGA, and becomes CBG when heated.

Then comes heat: drying, extraction, baking, smoking. It removes a carboxyl group as CO₂ and turns the acid forms into the neutral ones — THC, CBD, CBC.

Then comes time: oxygen, light and warmth break THC down further. What is left is CBN.

CBGA, the starting point

Cannabigerolic acid is the trunk. Everything else in the plant’s cannabinoid profile is built from it, which is why it is called the mother cannabinoid — and why almost none of it survives in a mature plant. It was spent building the others.

The three enzymes

THCA synthase turns CBGA into THCA, the precursor of THC. CBDA synthase turns it into CBDA, the precursor of CBD. CBCA synthase turns it into CBCA, the precursor of CBC.

Which enzyme a plant expresses, and how strongly, is what separates a hemp cultivar from a drug-type cultivar. It is genetics, not growing technique. You cannot turn a THC-dominant plant into a CBD-dominant one by changing the light schedule.

What heat does

Every acid form carries a carboxyl group — one carbon, two oxygens — hanging off the molecule. Heat knocks it off as carbon dioxide, and the acid becomes the neutral form. This single reaction is why raw cannabis does not intoxicate and heated cannabis does.

What time does

Oxygen, light and warmth degrade THC into CBN. This one is slow, cumulative and irreversible, and it is the reason a cannabinoid profile is also a record of how something was stored.

CBG — the mother cannabinoid

What it is

Cannabigerol: the neutral form of CBGA, produced when the leftover precursor is heated. It is not intoxicating.

Why it costs three to five times more

The price follows directly from the biosynthesis. In a mature plant almost no CBGA remains — it was converted. There are exactly two ways to get usable quantities, and both cost yield.

Harvest early, before enzymatic conversion has run its course, giving up most of the harvest from the same ground. Or breed cultivars in which the converting enzymes barely function. CBG-dominant varieties exist but are newer, less widespread and less optimised than CBD varieties.

In practice CBG isolate runs three to five times the price of CBD isolate per milligram.

CBG versus CBD

Neither is intoxicating. The difference lies in molecular structure and in where each sits in the biosynthesis — not in a ranking from better to worse.

How to verify CBG content

This is where the price gap becomes a motive. If a product advertises CBG and is not noticeably more expensive than a comparable CBD product, check the certificate — what you usually find is a content figure that barely justifies the name.

Work out the price per milligram of CBG, not of total cannabinoids. A product with 900 mg CBD and 100 mg CBG is a CBD product with a garnish, priced as something else.

CBD

What it is

Cannabidiol: the neutral form of CBDA, and the compound this entire industry is built on. Not intoxicating. The World Health Organization’s review found no evidence of abuse potential.

Full spectrum, broad spectrum, isolate

Full spectrum contains everything the plant made, including traces of THC below the legal limit. Broad spectrum contains the same compounds with the THC removed during processing. Isolate is cannabidiol alone, purified to 99 % or above.

This is not a quality ranking. All three can be excellent or mediocre. It is a question of constraints, and the main one concerns driving.

If you drive

Roadside and workplace tests look for THC, not CBD. A full spectrum product that is entirely legal legally contains traces of it, and no test distinguishes the source.

• Isolate — the only profile that excludes THC by construction.
• Broad spectrum — works if, and only if, the batch certificate confirms it. The words on the packaging are not the proof; the analysis is.
• Full spectrum — to avoid if you drive regularly.

The five steps that make an isolate

This is where most product pages stop at “CO2 extracted” and move on. Extraction is the first of five, and the last two are what separate an isolate from a distillate.

1 · Extraction. Supercritical CO2 or ethanol pulls the resin out of the plant matter. What comes out is a dark, viscous crude containing cannabinoids, waxes, lipids, chlorophyll and plant pigments.

2 · Winterisation. The crude is dissolved in ethanol and dropped to around −40 °C. Waxes and lipids stop being soluble at that temperature, fall out, and are filtered off. Skipping this is why some cheap oils taste grassy and turn cloudy when cold.

3 · Decarboxylation. Heat converts the remaining CBDA into CBD.

4 · Distillation. Short-path or wiped-film distillation separates compounds by boiling point, producing a distillate of roughly 80–90 % cannabinoids. Most broad spectrum products stop here.

5 · Chromatography and crystallisation. The distillate passes through a chromatography column that separates cannabidiol from the remaining minor cannabinoids, then crystallises out of solvent. This is the step that removes the last traces of THC, and it is the expensive one.

Each step removes something. An isolate is simply the end of that line.

What isolate physically is

A white crystalline powder, odourless and close to tasteless. Under magnification it looks like coarse sugar. It melts at roughly 66 °C, dissolves readily in oils and fats, and barely at all in water — which is why every isolate product on a shelf has been dissolved back into a carrier oil.

Why isolate is usually cheapest per milligram

Counter-intuitive, given it takes two more processing steps than a distillate, but it holds for two reasons. Isolate is produced at industrial scale and traded as a commodity, priced by the kilogram. And it carries no marketing premium: nobody sells an isolate on the promise of an entourage effect, so nobody charges for one.

How to verify an isolate is an isolate

A genuine isolate shows one cannabinoid on the certificate: CBD at 99 % or above, with every other cannabinoid reading ND or below the limit of quantitation. If the report lists CBG, CBC or CBN in measurable amounts, it is a distillate — not necessarily a worse product, but not what you were sold.

The entourage effect, stated accurately

You will read that isolate is inferior because it lacks the other plant compounds that supposedly act in synergy. It is the most common argument made against it.

What can be said without overstating: it is a research hypothesis, not an established finding, and certainly not a claim that may be used commercially. No health claim is authorised for cannabidiol in the European Union, and that includes this one.

CBDA — the acid form

What the plant actually makes

A living hemp plant contains almost no CBD. It contains CBDA, and CBD only appears once something applies heat — drying, curing, extraction, a vacuum oven. Every step that warms the material converts a little more.

The 0.877 factor

The carboxyl group has mass, and when it leaves as CO₂ the material gets lighter. The ratio of molecular weights gives a fixed conversion factor:

1 mg of CBDA yields about 0.877 mg of CBD.

So 1,000 mg of CBDA becomes roughly 877 mg of CBD, not 1,000. Around 12 % of the mass leaves as gas. That factor is standard chemistry, applied identically by every laboratory.

How “total CBD” inflates a label

Certificates usually report three figures: CBD, what is actually present as CBD; CBDA, what is present as the acid form; and total CBD, a calculated value equal to CBD + (CBDA × 0.877).

Total CBD is a legitimate figure with a specific meaning: the CBD you would have if all the CBDA were converted. It is the right number for material that is going to be heated.

It is the wrong number for a product sold as raw. A raw oil is raw precisely because it was not decarboxylated — the CBDA in it is still CBDA, sitting in your bottle. Advertising its total CBD describes a conversion that has not happened and, for that product, is not supposed to.

Raw versus decarboxylated

CBDA and CBD are not interchangeable molecules. They differ in structure, in solubility and in how they behave in the body. Whether that difference matters to you is a question nobody selling either one is allowed to answer.

Where this hits your wallet

Comparing price per milligram using total CBD on a raw product against actual CBD on a decarboxylated one compares a hypothetical with a measurement. Read the CBD and CBDA lines separately, and decide which one you are buying.

THC and THCA

Why raw cannabis is not intoxicating

The living plant contains THCA, and THCA is not psychoactive. Only heat removes the carboxyl group and converts it into THC. This is why baking works and eating raw material does not, and it is the same reaction that turns CBDA into CBD.

The legal limit

Hemp-derived products must stay below a THC threshold in the finished product — 0.3 % in France, 0.2 % in several other EU markets, 1 % in Switzerland. It is a threshold, not an absence, and that distinction is the whole point of the next section.

What a roadside test looks for

A saliva test detects THC and its metabolites. It does not measure CBD, and it has no interest in whether your bottle was legal. A perfectly compliant full spectrum product legally contains traces, and the test does not distinguish their origin.

CBN — the degradation product

The plant does not make it

CBN is what THC turns into when it sits around too long. Oxygen, light and heat break the molecule down, and cannabinol is what is left. Almost nothing written about CBN starts there, which is a shame, because every practical question about it follows from that one fact.

Why old material contains more

Because CBN accumulates as THC decays, its concentration is effectively a clock. Material stored warm, in light, or with plenty of air exposure will show more CBN and less THC than the same material stored cold and dark. That makes CBN content a useful indicator of how a batch was handled — and it is almost never presented that way.

The first cannabinoid ever isolated

CBN was isolated in Cambridge in 1896, decades before THC and CBD were identified. Not because it was the most interesting compound, but because the resin samples reaching English laboratories had travelled from India by sea and sat in transit for months. The chemists were studying an aged sample, and CBN was the most abundant thing in it. They isolated the degradation product first because degradation was what they had.

Where commercial CBN comes from

Since the plant does not make useful amounts, the CBN in a product was manufactured. Two routes.

Deliberate oxidation of THC — controlled heat and oxygen, running on purpose the same reaction that spoils old cannabis. Efficient, but it starts from a controlled substance, which constrains where it can legally be done.

Conversion from CBD — an acid-catalysed reaction. This is the common industrial route in hemp-derived supply chains, because it starts from a legal, abundant input.

The second matters when you read a label: it is a chemical conversion in a reactor, not an extraction from a plant. Nothing wrong with that — but “naturally derived” is doing a lot of work in some marketing copy.

The sleep question, answered honestly

CBN is sold almost exclusively on one association, and it is worth understanding where it came from. The idea traces back to a small number of studies from the 1970s, on very few subjects, in which CBN was administered alongside THC. The sedation observed in those conditions is difficult to attribute to CBN rather than to the THC it came with. Subsequent work has not established the effect for CBN on its own, and the body of evidence remains thin.

There is a second, entirely separate reason we will not repeat the claim: Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 authorises no health claim for any cannabinoid.

Is CBN intoxicating?

Probably very weakly, and the honest answer is that it is not well characterised. CBN shows some affinity for the CB1 receptor — the one THC acts on — but considerably less.

That has a catch worth knowing. A drug test looks for THC, not CBN. But a CBN product made by oxidising THC may retain residual THC, and only the batch certificate tells you whether it does.

The regulatory grey area

CBN sits more awkwardly than CBD for a structural reason: it derives from THC. Jurisdictions differ on what “derived from a controlled substance” means, and some frame the question by origin rather than by the properties of the final molecule. A CBN made by converting CBD may fall under a different regime from a chemically identical one made by oxidising THC — same molecule, different paperwork. If you are buying across a border, that detail decides the outcome, and it is not visible in the product.

CBC and the minor cannabinoids

CBC (cannabichromene) comes from CBCA by the same heat reaction. It is not intoxicating and is usually present at low levels. THCV, CBDV and others appear in trace amounts in most cultivars. They share the pattern: an acid precursor, a heat step, and a neutral form.

The research base for all of them is thinner than for CBD, which is itself thin. Anyone presenting a minor cannabinoid as a solved question is ahead of the evidence.

Semi-synthetic cannabinoids

How HHC is made

HHC — hexahydrocannabinol — is produced by hydrogenation, from THC or from CBD. Semi-synthetic means the input comes from the plant but the output is not present in nature in meaningful amounts. It is made in a reactor, not extracted from a flower.

Why the legal position keeps changing

Because HHC was not on any controlled-substances list when it appeared, and legislators have been adding it since. Germany brought HHC and its successors under the NpSG; other countries have moved at their own pace and in their own direction. This is the fastest-moving corner of the field, and any page that states a position without a date is unreliable by construction. Ours carry the date they were checked.

Reading a certificate of analysis

The batch number comes first

If the number on the certificate does not match the number on your bottle, nothing else on the document is about what you bought. A brand-level report, or one from an earlier harvest, tells you nothing. This is the first check because it can invalidate every other one.

The THC line

Three possible outcomes. ND (not detected) or < LOQ (below the limit of quantitation) means the laboratory found none. A quantified figure means there is some — the product may be perfectly legal, but it is not THC-free. No THC line at all is the worst of the three: an analysis that does not measure THC does not answer the question.

The cannabinoid table

This is what you are paying for. Check that the CBD figure matches the label, that CBDA is reported separately, and that any minor cannabinoid named on the packaging appears with a number rather than a mention.

Contaminants

Hemp is a bioaccumulator: it draws heavy metals out of soil efficiently. That is a useful trait for remediating contaminated land and a liability in a consumer product. A full certificate covers heavy metals, pesticides and residual solvents. The last matters most for isolates and distillates, because chromatography runs on solvents.

What a missing section means

Not that the product is contaminated — that the question is unanswered. An absent section is an absent answer, never a pass.

Price per milligram

The arithmetic

Three numbers appear on a label and they say different things. Percentage is concentration. Total milligrams is quantity — volume × concentration. Price per milligram is the only one that allows a comparison: price ÷ total milligrams.

Bottle B costs three times as much and works out half the price.

Why concentration is not price

A higher percentage means fewer drops for the same quantity, which is a genuine comfort factor if you dislike the taste. It also makes small adjustments harder, because each drop carries more. What it does not tell you is whether the product is good value.

Comparing across formats

For flower and resin, divide the price per gram by the percentage. A resin at 20 % for €12/g works out at €0.060 per milligram; a flower at 10 % for €5/g works out at €0.050. The resin is twice as concentrated and more expensive per milligram of CBD.

Hemp and marijuana are the same species

This is the distinction everything legal rests on, and it is not botanical.

One plant, two legal categories

Hemp and marijuana are both Cannabis sativa. There is no botanical boundary between them, no separate species, no genetic line you could point at under a microscope and call the border. The difference is a number written into law: below a THC threshold in the finished product, the plant is hemp and is an agricultural commodity. Above it, the same plant is a controlled substance.

Why the threshold differs by country

Because each jurisdiction picked its own. 0.3 % in France and the United States, 0.2 % in Germany and several other EU markets, 1 % in Switzerland. The plant did not change when it crossed the border; the classification did. This is why a product perfectly legal where it was made can be illegal where it is delivered.

What this means for a cultivar

Breeders select for which enzyme dominates — the mechanism described at the top of this page. A hemp cultivar is one bred so that CBDA synthase outruns THCA synthase, keeping the finished product under the threshold. It is the same biosynthesis, tuned by selection.

Extraction methods compared

Every product on the market started as plant matter and a choice of solvent. The choice leaves traces, and that is why it matters at all.

Supercritical CO₂

Carbon dioxide held above its critical point behaves as both liquid and gas, dissolving the resin and then evaporating completely when pressure drops. It leaves no solvent residue, because the solvent is a gas at room temperature. Equipment is expensive, which is most of why CO₂-extracted products cost more.

Ethanol

Food-grade ethanol is efficient, cheap and scales well. It also extracts chlorophyll and water-soluble compounds along with the cannabinoids, which is why ethanol crudes are darker and often need more refining. Not inferior — but the certificate should show residual solvents tested and cleared.

Hydrocarbons

Butane and propane produce very clean extracts and are common in concentrates. They also require proper closed-loop equipment and thorough purging. This is the method where the residual solvent line on the certificate stops being a formality.

What to conclude from the method

Very little, on its own. The method is a production choice; the analysis is the evidence. A CO₂ extract with no residual solvent panel tells you less than an ethanol extract with one.

The label tricks worth knowing

Nothing here is illegal. All of it is imprecise in a direction that happens to favour the seller.

“Total CBD” on a raw product

Covered in detail above: it describes a conversion that has not happened. The single most common inflation on the market.

Milligrams of “hemp extract”, not of CBD

A bottle can honestly claim 1,000 mg of hemp extract while containing a fraction of that as cannabidiol. Extract includes everything that came out of the plant. Look for the CBD figure specifically.

“Lab tested” without a certificate

A phrase, not a document. If the certificate is not linked, downloadable and matched to a batch, the claim is unverifiable.

A percentage with no volume

10 % of what? Concentration without volume gives no quantity, and quantity is what you are buying.

Minor cannabinoids named but not quantified

“With CBG” is a marketing line until a number appears next to it on an analysis. This is where the price gap makes the omission worth someone’s while.

Buying across a border

The single most common way a well-informed buyer runs into trouble.

The product does not carry its legality with it

A full spectrum oil compliant at 0.3 % THC in France is over the limit in Germany at 0.2 %. Nothing about the bottle changes; the applicable number does. Compliance is a property of the transaction, not of the object.

Derived-from rules

Some frameworks classify by origin rather than by the final molecule — the CBN problem described above. Two chemically identical products can be treated differently depending on what they were made from, and the paperwork is not visible in the product.

What we do about it

Our legal pages are per country, carry the date they were checked, and the market matrix decides which categories appear on which language’s homepage. A product banned in a market is not listed in that market, and the build fails if that rule is broken.

The endocannabinoid system

Plant cannabinoids would act on nothing if the body did not already have a system of its own. It produces endocannabinoids — anandamide and 2-AG among them — and the receptors they bind to: CB1, concentrated in the nervous system, and CB2, associated mainly with immune cells.

Why THC intoxicates and CBD does not

THC binds directly to CB1. CBD barely does — its interaction with the system is indirect and less well characterised. That structural difference is the whole reason one is a controlled substance in most of the world and the other is sold in supermarkets.

Where the honest account stops

The receptor mechanism is described in the literature. Turning that description into a promise about what a product will do for you is exactly what the regulation forbids, and what the evidence does not support. Knowing that a lock exists is not knowing what happens when it opens.

Terpenes

Cannabinoids are not the only thing the plant makes. Terpenes are the volatile compounds responsible for smell: myrcene, limonene, pinene, linalool, caryophyllene. They also occur in hops, citrus and pine — nothing about them is specific to cannabis.

Why two batches with the same CBD smell different

Terpenes are volatile, which is the practical consequence that matters. Drying too fast or too warm drives them off before the product reaches the packaging. Two flowers with an identical declared CBD figure can smell entirely different, and the difference is usually curing rather than genetics.

Terpenes on a certificate

Most certificates do not test for them, because terpene analysis is a separate and more expensive panel. Where a producer does publish one, it is a reasonable signal of care — but the absence of a terpene profile says nothing bad, only that it was not measured.

Storing it properly

The CBN section above is really a storage lesson in disguise: cannabinoid profiles degrade, and how fast depends entirely on conditions.

The three things that degrade it

Light drives oxidation, which is why serious products ship in amber or opaque glass. Heat accelerates every reaction, including decarboxylation in raw products. Oxygen is what turns THC into CBN in the first place. A half-empty bottle degrades faster than a full one, because of the air above the liquid.

What that means in practice

Cool, dark and closed. A cupboard beats a windowsill by a wide margin. Refrigeration is not necessary for oils and can cause thickening or condensation. There is no cannabinoid that improves with age.

Format and absorption

The same milligram behaves differently depending on how it is taken, and this is where the word “strong” gets used loosely.

Why the format matters at all

CBD is lipophilic: it dissolves in fats, not in water. Everything about how the body handles it follows from that.

Oral, sublingual, inhaled

Taken orally, it passes through the digestive system and then the liver, where a portion is metabolised before reaching general circulation — the first-pass effect. Taken sublingually, part of it is absorbed through the mucous membrane and partly bypasses that step. Inhalation is the fastest route.

What cannot be said honestly

Precise bioavailability percentages circulate widely and vary enormously between studies, depending on protocol, formulation and the person. Anyone quoting a specific figure with confidence is more certain than the data allows.

Choosing by constraint, not by claim

Everything above is description. This section is the part that changes what you do, and it works by elimination rather than by promise — because constraints are knowable and outcomes are not.

Start with the constraint that disqualifies

Most buying advice starts from what you want. Start instead from what would make a product wrong for you, because that question has verifiable answers.

Do you drive, or are you subject to workplace testing? That single fact eliminates full spectrum, and it eliminates broad spectrum whose batch certificate does not show THC as not detected. It is the constraint with the highest cost of getting wrong, and it is decided by one line on one document.

Are you taking prescription medication? Then the decision is not yours or ours to make — it belongs to a doctor or pharmacist, because these compounds are metabolised by liver enzymes that also process a large number of drugs.

Are you buying in one country and receiving in another? The threshold that applies is the one at the destination, not the one where the product was made.

Then eliminate on evidence

Of what remains, discard anything that fails a check you can make in under a minute.

No batch certificate, or a certificate whose batch number does not match the container. No quantified THC line. A minor cannabinoid named on the front and absent from the analysis. A percentage with no volume, so no total milligrams. Total CBD advertised on a product sold as raw.

None of these mean the product is bad. They mean the question is unanswered, and an unanswered question is not a reason to buy.

Only then compare on price

What survives both filters is a set of products that suit your situation and can prove what they contain. Now the arithmetic decides: total price divided by total milligrams of CBD.

This ordering matters more than it looks. Comparing on price first means comparing products that may not be usable by you — and the cheapest per milligram is worthless if the certificate shows THC and you drive for a living.

What about format?

Choose it for practical reasons rather than expected effect. An oil lets you adjust in small steps and is the easiest to compare on price per milligram. Capsules give a fixed quantity and no taste. Topicals are a cosmetic category in most of Europe, with a different legal status from anything ingestible — which is often why the same extract appears in two products with very different labelling.

Flower and resin are compared the same way as everything else, dividing price per gram by percentage, with the added practical point that neither is distinguishable from cannabis during a roadside check.

The question to ask a seller

If you take one thing from this page into a shop, make it this: “Can I see the certificate of analysis for this batch?”

The answer tells you more than any product description. A shop that produces it immediately, matched to the number on the container, has already done the work that the rest of this guide describes. A shop that offers a brand-level document, an older analysis, or an explanation of why it is not necessary, has answered a different question from the one you asked.

What good looks like

A product worth buying can show you: a batch certificate from an independent laboratory whose number matches the container; a quantified THC figure below the limit of the market you are in; CBD and CBDA reported separately; heavy metals, pesticides and residual solvents tested; and a total milligram figure that lets you do the division yourself.

That is a short list, it is entirely verifiable, and it contains no claims about what will happen to you. That is deliberate — it is the only kind of list anyone selling cannabidiol is in a position to honour.

What this guide will not tell you

What any of these compounds do.

The regulation

Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 authorises no health claim for any cannabinoid. Not for CBD, not for CBG, not for CBN. A shop that promises you an outcome is telling you at minimum that it is not following the rules it operates under.

What EFSA established

EFSA has not been able to establish the safety of regular oral consumption of cannabidiol, reaffirmed that position in 2025, and pointed to a provisional reference value in the order of 2 mg per day. Safety could not be established for people under 25, for pregnant or breastfeeding women, or for people taking medication.

Worth connecting to the section above: the most concentrated products are precisely the ones where that reference value is reached fastest. A single drop of a high-strength oil is already several milligrams.

If you take medication

That conversation belongs with a doctor or pharmacist. These compounds are metabolised by liver enzymes that also process a large number of drugs, which can change their concentration in blood.

Frequently asked questions

What are cannabinoids? A family of compounds that interact with the endocannabinoid system. Phytocannabinoids come from the plant, endocannabinoids are made by the body, synthetic ones are made in a laboratory.

How many cannabinoids are there? Over a hundred have been described in the plant, but only a handful occur in meaningful amounts.

Which cannabinoid comes first? CBGA. The plant builds all the others from it, which is why it is called the mother cannabinoid.

What is the difference between CBG and CBD? CBG is the starting material, CBD one of the end products. In the plant, CBG sits at the beginning of the biosynthesis and CBD at the end.

Why is CBG so expensive? Because almost none of it survives in a mature plant. You must harvest early or grow dedicated cultivars, and both cost yield. Expect three to five times the price of CBD per milligram.

What is CBD isolate? Cannabidiol purified to 99 % or above, separated from every other compound in the plant. A white crystalline powder, usually redissolved in a carrier oil.

Does CBD isolate contain THC? No. Purification removes it entirely, which differs from full spectrum products that legally contain traces below the limit.

Is isolate lower quality than full spectrum? No. They are different compositions, not different grades. Quality is read from the batch certificate, not from the profile.

What is CBDA? Cannabidiolic acid, the form the plant actually produces. CBD appears when heat removes the carboxyl group, in a reaction called decarboxylation.

How much CBD does CBDA convert into? About 0.877 mg per mg of CBDA — roughly 12 % of the mass leaves as carbon dioxide.

What does “raw” mean on a CBD product? That it was not decarboxylated, so it still contains mostly CBDA rather than CBD.

Why does total CBD look higher than the CBD figure? Because it is calculated as CBD plus CBDA multiplied by 0.877. On a raw product it describes a conversion that has not taken place.

Why is raw cannabis not intoxicating? Because it contains THCA rather than THC. Only heat removes the carboxyl group and converts it.

What is CBN? Cannabinol, formed when THC degrades through exposure to oxygen, light and heat. The plant does not produce it directly in useful amounts.

Why does old cannabis have more CBN? Because CBN accumulates as THC breaks down. Its concentration acts as a rough clock on age and storage conditions.

Will CBN show up on a drug test? Tests look for THC and its metabolites, not CBN. But CBN made by oxidising THC can carry residual THC — the batch certificate is what tells you.

Is HHC a natural cannabinoid? No. HHC is semi-synthetic, usually made by hydrogenation, and is not present in the plant in meaningful amounts.

What should I check on a certificate of analysis? The batch number against your bottle first, then the THC line, then the cannabinoid table, then contaminants. A missing section is an unanswered question, not a pass.

How do I compare two CBD products? By price per milligram: total price divided by total milligrams of CBD. Percentage alone does not allow a comparison.

Does the carrier oil matter? It affects taste and texture, not the CBD content.

Are CBD products authorised as food in the EU? Formally no: CBD holds novel food status and no cannabinoid product appears on the Union list. In practice they are sold and largely tolerated.

Are hemp and marijuana different plants? No, both are Cannabis sativa. The distinction is a legal threshold on THC content in the finished product, not a botanical boundary.

Which extraction method is best? The question is less useful than it sounds. Supercritical CO₂ leaves no solvent residue because the solvent is a gas at room temperature; ethanol and hydrocarbons are perfectly good when the certificate confirms residual solvents were tested and cleared. The analysis settles it, not the method.

How should I store CBD oil? Cool, dark and closed. Light drives oxidation, heat accelerates every reaction, and oxygen is what turns THC into CBN. A half-empty bottle degrades faster than a full one because of the air above the liquid.

Does CBD oil expire? Cannabinoid content degrades over time rather than the product becoming unsafe on a fixed date. The rate depends almost entirely on storage conditions.

What does “hemp extract” on a label mean? Everything that came out of the plant, which is not the same as cannabidiol. A bottle can honestly declare 1,000 mg of hemp extract while containing a fraction of that as CBD. Look for the CBD figure specifically.

Why do two flowers with the same CBD percentage smell different? Terpenes, and usually curing rather than genetics. They are volatile, so drying too fast or too warm drives them off before the product is packaged.

Is a product legal everywhere if it is legal where it was made? No. The threshold that applies is the one at the destination. A full spectrum oil compliant at 0.3 % THC is over the limit in a market that sets 0.2 %.