No cannabinoid receives more attention than cannabidiol (CBD). The compound is popular because of its many therapeutic benefits. When people started using CBD, they would mostly use other means of consumption, such as sublingual and ingestion. But many people now prefer smoking hemp flowers.
The number of CBD users has grown over the years, and so has the number of smokers. Smoking CBD is safe since CBD does not have dangerous chemicals that could harm your lungs. You can now buy premium hemp flowers from your favorite online vendor and have them delivered to your doorstep.
But why is smoking CBD trendy lately? Does smoking offer any benefit over other consumption methods? Let’s find out.
Benefits of Smoking CBD Hemp Flower
The Entourage Effect
Smoking whole flowers offers the user the benefits of other chemicals in cannabis. Yes, when you take the whole bud rather than the extracts, you benefit from other phytocannabinoids, fatty acids, vitamins, terpenes, and other nutrients. Sure, most people don’t even know that cannabis contains vitamins and fatty acids.
When you use extracts, you leave out the benefits these other compounds offer. Unless you have been consuming whole-spectrum CBD, you have been missing a lot. The other cannabis extracts don’t offer the user the experience of receiving the natural and unique compounds in cannabis.
An increasing amount of evidence shows that cannabis exerts its effects best when taken whole. Cannabis delivers its effects in a synergetic way such that taking the whole bud enhances the effects of CBD. You won’t get the full potency of cannabinoids when you take them as individual isolates.
Of course, CBD is still effective as an isolate, only that it won’t be as powerful as in its natural form. That’s why users who have discovered the entourage effect of cannabinoids choose to smoke hemp flowers.
Quick Delivery
Ingestion is one of the most common ways of consuming CBD, but slow acting. You need to wait for about an hour before you start feeling the effects of ingested CBD. That’s not an effective method when you are in severe pain and need quick results.
When you are faced with an urgent problem such as a panic attack, you need a way to deliver CBD into your bloodstream fast. Smoking can do that. Research shows that smoking is one of the quickest ways to deliver CBD into the bloodstream.
Smoking can be an effective way of calming anxiety or easing pain in emergencies when you need fast results. It takes just a few minutes to feel the effects.
High Bioavailability
Do you know that you never get the entire CBD content on the label into your bloodstream? Most of it is lost during processing. No method will deliver 100% of the content into your bloodstream, but some methods are less wasteful.
Bioavailability refers to the amount of the chemical absorbed into the bloodstream. Drugs need to have high bioavailability for them to be most effective. When it comes to CBD, the consumption method affects its bioavailability, with ingestion offering the lowest bioavailability.
When you ingest CBD, it goes through the intestines for processing, where it contends with stomach acids and other chemicals. As CBD breaks down in your intestines, it loses most of its potency before entering the bloodstream.
If you use CBD for therapeutic purposes, you need to ensure you get as much as possible into your body. The bioavailability of smoked CBD is about 31% and can reach 50%. This makes smoking one of the most efficient methods (alongside vaping) compared to other methods like ingestion.
Smoking is Cheaper
Tinctures and CBD oil are more expensive than CBD pre-rolls. Hemp flower goes through delicate and expensive processing methods to obtain distillates or extracts. The consumer has to pay both for the CBD and processing costs.
But what if you can bypass the expensive processing? It would significantly lower the cost of your CBD, isn’t it? And that’s why it is cheaper to buy CBD-rich hemp pre-rolls than extracts.
Conclusion
Many people are concerned about the legality of smoking CBD. Well, smoking isn’t illegal; it is what you smoke that matters. Marijuana is illegal because it contains high THC amounts, and it doesn’t matter whether you smoke or ingest it; it remains illegal. Smoking CBD is legal, of course, if CBD is legal in your state.
But what about the smell? CBD hemp flower smells just like weed. More so, hemp and marijuana flowers look similar and have the same flavor. The terpenes, which give the plant its flavor and smell, are the same in both marijuana and hemp. The difference is only in THC composition. If you don’t want the smell, you can choose flavored hemp flowers to musk the earthy smell of weed.