Why You Can’t Buy CBD Gummies on Amazon

Why should you avoid shopping for CBD from America’s largest online retailer? Find out in this informative article.
By Paaez Coleman

“Can I buy CBD on Amazon?” 

If you’ve visited Amazon.com and tried to purchase a CBD product, chances are you had a pretty bad experience. Amazon, you see, has a pretty clear policy in place that expressly forbids the sale of anything it deems as a drug or drug paraphernalia. Unfortunately, Amazon considers CBD to be a drug, and forbids its sale on their site. And yes, CBD is perfectly legal at the federal level, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the country’s foremost web retailer, at this point.

Still, some brands try to mislead their customers by offering cleverly labeled hemp products. What those brands don’t tell you is that those “hemp” products don’t actually contain CBD. Or in other cases, they do include CBD, but aren’t forthcoming with that information.

With more than 500 million products available in the Amazon marketplace, the CBD market is in a very curious position. 

But don’t worry, we’ll explain.

Understanding Today’s CBD Laws

To say that the U.S.’ current CBD laws are confusing is an understatement.

Here’s what we mean.

Three years ago, the House and Senate passed the much anticipated 2018 Farm Bill. The importance of this bill was significant. Essentially, the bill stated that hemp was an agricultural crop, and would hence be removed from the federal government’s list of controlled substances.

For context, items on that list included a wide variety of drugs — both natural and synthetic — including marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms (shrooms), cocaine, crack, and heroin.

Understandably, including hemp on that list — even as a cannabis plant (more on this later) — felt a bit extreme. Hemp carries less than 0.3% THC content (THC being the cannabinoid that gets you “high”) and is generally considered safe for use. For this reason, it was eventually decriminalized.

Cannabis plants can generally be split into two categories: hemp and marijuana. Hemp plants, as mentioned, are cannabis plants with less than 0.3% THC, while marijuana refers to cannabis plants with more THC, sometimes upwards of 30%. CBD — typically in the form of oil — is pulled from the hemp plant’s buds, leaves and stalks, and is used as a natural form of treatment for conditions like anxiety relief, chronic pain, and insomnia. 

Hemp seed oil, on the other hand, is a beneficial and healthy oil that’s derived from the seeds of the hemp plant — not the buds, stalk and leaves. The biggest difference between hemp seed oil and CBD oil is that the former lacks CBD. So, if you’re on Amazon and you think you’re buying CBD oil, you’re very likely getting hemp seed oil instead. Although hemp seed oil is known to have anti-inflammatory properties, many users significantly prefer the more pronounced effects of CBD oil, by comparison.

Now, with that understanding, here’s where things get a little wacky.

Although hemp-derived products, like CBD, are legal in all 50 states and don’t require approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the FDA has very specific guidelines on how CBD can be talked about in marketing and packaging.

For instance, the FDA has said it doesn’t want CBD brands to include CBD oil in food. Although many brands are anticipating the FDA to soften on this issue — which is the reason why so many CBD brands are selling CBD gummies — many are still careful with how they package their CBD products and edibles, avoiding glaring infractions such as CBD cookies, chocolates, and other foodstuffs.

Although many states are following the FDA’s guidelines, some states have their own regulations on how CBD can be packaged. As you can imagine, this only deepens the overall sense of confusion.

Now, with the CBD market outside of Amazon being largely in flux, you can probably see why Amazon (a global retailer) simply put a hard-and-fast rule on forbidding the sale of CBD in an effort to stay out of trouble.

And that leads us to…

Amazon’s Complex Stance on Cannabis Products

In short, their answer is “no.”

But strangely enough, that’s a “no” with an asterisk. What we mean is that although Amazon expressly forbids the sale of CBD products, many CBD brands are getting around this limitation by labeling their products as “hemp seed oil.”

“But won’t people avoid those products in favor of real CBD?”

Not quite.

The Washington Post found that after looking into multiple “hemp” products listed on Amazon, many of these brands were answering user questions such as “does this product have CBD in it?” with an emphatic “yes!”

And they weren’t lying, either.

When the Post went on to test these products, they found that the overwhelming majority of them had CBD oil in them; the CBD just wasn’t included in their ingredients list.

They also tracked some of these products back to their brands’ websites and found that many of the products were identical in every way to those offered on the site (proudly listing CBD as an ingredient). The only difference was the label.

So, what does all this mean?

It means that not only is finding a true CBD product on Amazon extremely difficult, it’s also meant to be. Though Amazon does not advocate the sale of CBD products on their website, they themselves have categorized products found to contain CBD with the “Amazon’s Choice” label.

This makes you wonder if Amazon is willingly choosing to turn a blind eye… 

Closing Thoughts

Here at CBDfx, we don’t hide our products’ inherent properties behind black-marked brand labels. We believe that’s dishonest to our customers, and to be frank, it’s a poor way to do business.

CBD is in our name, and we’re proud of it.

Our CBD gummies are made with the highest quality ingredients — always. We gather industrial-grade hemp plants that are organically grown and pesticide-free, and extract the purest form of CBD using the cleanest and most-efficient CO2 extraction processes to ensure you’re getting the maximum benefits from the safest products.

For the added benefit of our customers, we also ensure that every single product we make is done in a Good Manufacturing Process (GMP) facility that adheres to the very strictest quality and supervision standards in the industry.

We also include the individual third-party lab reports for all of our products, so you can trace the purity of your products back to the source.

In short, we care about quality, we care about our products, and we care about you.

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