The FDA will use Reddit to learn more about cannabis-derived products, including CBD and Delta-8

By Nicolas Jose Rodriguez

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it plans to use Reddit and other data sources to better understand the public health issues related to the use of CBD and other cannabis-derived products (CDP).

“The FDA also needs information about general patterns of product usage and emerging trends – and it needs this information in near real-time so that the FDA can deploy its limited resources quickly and effectively,” stated a recent report by the FDA on its new data acceleration plan for Cannabis derived products. “The FDA believes that new approaches to the detection of safety signals and other insights using a variety of data sources and rigorous analytical methods can make a significant contribution to enabling the FDA to respond to emerging and rapidly evolving product areas such as the CDP market to react.”

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The FDA defines the Data Acceleration Plan (DAP) for cannabis-derived products as a “portfolio of pilot initiatives and partnerships focused on the advancement of data-driven safety signal detection”.

According to the agency’s website, the DAP uses novel data sources and advanced data analytics to identify current and emerging security vulnerabilities in the CDP market and to assess consumer vulnerabilities.

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One of the sample pilots listed in the DAP aims to identify safety issues in cannabis products using online data, using sources such as Reddit and “consumer reviews” that can “complement traditional systems or identify problems that traditional systems may not can be easily grasped ”. . “

Other sample projects aim to analyze online certificates of analysis about the FDA’s CBD product sampling project and understanding of the cannabis market, including the CBD and Delta-8-THC market landscape, to enforce regulations.

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Other cannabis-derived compounds the agency is interested about are delta-10-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-10-THC), cannabinol (CBN), tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV), and cannabigerol (CBG).

This article originally appeared on Benzinga and was republished with permission.