What does CBD actually do? This covers whether it gets you high, the public-speaking studies behind CBD for anxiety and why only the middle dose helped, the sleep trials from 1981 to 2025, the seizure trials behind the prescription drug, what lab tests found in CBD products and gummies, when CBD can make you fail a drug test, and what it can do to your liver and to other medicines. I have a business stake in cannabis, so weigh what I say with that in mind.
The full answer
What does CBD actually do?
What does CBD actually do? It clearly cuts seizures in two rare childhood epilepsies, and for anxiety and sleep the trials are small and mixed. I'm Justin Hartfield, and I've been selling cannabis for twenty-five years. I have a business stake in cannabis, so weigh what I say here with that in mind. CBD gets sold as a fix for almost everything, but the best proof that it works comes from one narrow use.
Does CBD get you high?
Does CBD get you high? No. As I explained in the CBD versus THC video, it barely turns the CB1 lock. In 2018, the company behind prescription CBD gave forty-three recreational drug users single doses of up to forty-five hundred milligrams of its CBD, blinded against a sedative, a THC pill and a placebo. At seven hundred and fifty milligrams they liked it no more than placebo. At the higher doses they liked it slightly more, but far less than the sedative or the THC pill, and it didn't slow their thinking. In clinical studies, mostly in epilepsy or psychosis, tiredness was one of the most common side effects, but that isn't a high.
Does CBD help with anxiety?
Does CBD help with anxiety? In a lab test it can, but only at the right dose. In 2011 in Brazil, twelve people with social anxiety who took six hundred milligrams of CBD were less anxious during a simulated public speech than twelve who took placebo. In 2019, fifty-seven healthy men did the same test, and only three hundred milligrams helped, while one hundred fifty and six hundred did nothing. That shape, where too little and too much both fail, is called an inverted U. The longer trials are less clear. In 2022, eighty Dutch patients with social anxiety or panic disorder took three hundred milligrams or placebo alongside eight sessions of exposure therapy, and CBD made no difference. A 2025 review of the placebo-controlled trials rated the evidence for CBD in social and generalized anxiety low quality.
Does CBD help you sleep?
Does CBD help you sleep? The controlled trials are small, and most found little. A 1981 report described fifteen people with insomnia who said they slept more on one hundred sixty milligrams of CBD than on placebo. In 2018, twenty-six healthy volunteers slept in a lab after three hundred milligrams or placebo, and the recordings showed no change. In 2024, thirty Australians with insomnia took one hundred fifty milligrams or placebo every night for two weeks, and their insomnia scores didn't differ, though the CBD group reported greater well-being and their wrist trackers showed more efficient sleep by the second week. The biggest trial I found, run in 2025 by a private research group, gave a CBD and terpene blend to a hundred and twenty-five people with insomnia. Their trackers recorded a little over one percentage point more of the night in deep and dream sleep, and no change in total sleep.
Does CBD help with seizures?
Does CBD help with seizures? Yes, and this is the clearest proof CBD does something in people. In 2017, a trial of a hundred and twenty children and teenagers with Dravet syndrome found that convulsive seizures fell from a typical twelve a month to about six on CBD, while on placebo they barely moved. Two trials in Lennox-Gastaut syndrome followed in 2018, with patients aged two to fifty-five, and in both, drop seizures fell by thirty-seven to forty-four percent on CBD, against about twenty on placebo. The drug's maker, GW Pharmaceuticals, paid for all three trials, and on June twenty-fifth, 2018, the FDA approved it for both syndromes in patients two and older.
What's actually in CBD products?
What's actually in CBD products? Often not what the label says. In 2022, a team in Kentucky tested eighty CBD products bought online and in local shops, and only fifty-four percent were within ten percent of the CBD on the label. In 2025, researchers there tested fifty-six gummy products from national brands. Seventy percent of the gummies were off by more than ten percent, thirty-nine percent contained THC, and nine had more than four tenths of a milligram of THC per gummy. Even gummies from the same bottle varied.
Does CBD show up on a drug test?
Does CBD show up on a drug test? CBD itself doesn't, because urine tests look for what your body makes from THC, but the THC that comes along with CBD can. You may have heard stomach acid turns CBD into THC. In 2022, a Johns Hopkins team gave eighteen adults pure CBD in four forms and found no sign of that in any of them. When the same people vaped hemp-type flower with a hundred milligrams of CBD and under four milligrams of THC, three of the eighteen gave urine above the cutoff labs use to confirm a positive. And in the 2021 study from the CBD versus THC video, half the people on a daily full-spectrum oil tested positive after four weeks.
Is CBD bad for your liver?
Is CBD bad for your liver? It can raise liver enzymes, an early warning sign of liver injury, in some people. In the larger 2018 Lennox-Gastaut trial, nine percent of patients on CBD had raised enzymes, and the drug's label shows they rose far more often in patients also taking valproate, another seizure drug. In 2020, five of sixteen healthy adults taking fifteen hundred milligrams a day had enzyme levels more than five times the normal limit. In 2025, the FDA ran its own trial at a dose it described as within the range people take from unregulated products. Of two hundred and one healthy adults, eight on CBD had enzymes over three times the normal limit, and none on placebo did. CBD also changes the blood levels of some other drugs, and in two case reports, people on the blood thinner warfarin needed their dose cut by nearly a fifth and by thirty percent after starting CBD. If you take prescription medicine, ask your doctor before adding CBD.
The whole film is on my site, linked below. Next: What are CBN, CBG and CBC?
What the studies show
Every claim in this answer, the study behind it, who was studied, and who paid for the research. “None listed” means the paper names no funder.
