According to the survey, 58% of Americans don’t know the difference between THC and CBD

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Ten years ago, the idea that an adult could go into a store and buy legal weeds seemed like a pipe dream. Fast forward to 2021, and adult cannabis is now legal in over a quarter of the US and a medicinal pot is available in most of the country. Americans now have unprecedented access to cannabis, but the average person knows next to nothing about the plant, according to a new independent online survey.

Data analytics and survey firm Invisible conducted an anonymous survey to find out if Americans’ ignorance of cannabis is negatively impacting the ability of CBD companies to market and sell their products. To conduct the survey, Invisibly recruited more than a thousand people from various demographic and geographic regions and asked them to answer five simple questions about cannabis.

Don Vaughn, Product Director at Invisibly, expected that most of the respondents would have a good basic understanding of the two most common cannabinoids, but was shocked to find out exactly the opposite was the case. “We found that 58% of Americans don’t know the difference between CBD and THC,” Vaughn told Boulder Weekly. “I was surprised.”

Even more surprising was the fact that 62 percent of respondents said they had never used a CBD product before, and 53 percent said they didn’t even want to try CBD. And of those who had previously used THC or CBD, only 36 percent said they understood the difference between these two cannabinoids.

“It’s just a lot, a lot less understood than we thought,” explained Vaughn. “Associating CBD with the rest of cannabis does harm [these companies’] Ability to do marketing. “

CBD has been legal since early 2019, along with all other hemp-derived products. However, the US Food and Drug Administration has not yet published final regulations for CBD-infused products, so these are in a legal gray area. As a result, police officers are still beating up people for transporting, selling, or even owning federal hemp or CBD products, and some companies continue to ban perfectly legitimate companies from advertising their goods.

“Some exchanges let CBD companies advertise, but others say they are too close to ‘drugs’ and not get into that legal gray area,” Vaughn told Boulder Weekly. “And small or medium-sized entrepreneurs don’t have the political control to go out there and do a lot about it at the moment.”

The fact that most Americans don’t understand the difference between legal CBD products and government-banned marijuana definitely doesn’t help. The new survey highlights the fact that CBD companies are having to work harder to destroy this “information bubble” by educating potential customers about the difference between these common cannabinoids.

But while most Americans may not understand the facts about cannabis, they are at least warming to the prospect of weed reform. Last month, four different national polls found majority support for the legalization of cannabis by the federal government in nearly every population group. In fact, one poll found that a shocking 91 percent of respondents would like the US to legalize cannabis, medical marijuana, or both for adults.