CBD is everywhere right now.

You’ve seen it in stores like CVS, Rite Aid and Shoppers Drug Mart. It’s in pain relief, and skin care, and if you’re so inclined, you can even feed it to your pets.

On one hand, we’ve got companies making claims that CBD cures everything from glaucoma to cancer, and getting in some serious regulatory hot water for it. On the other hand, we have everyday folks dropping CBD tinctures and claiming no discernible reaction. None.

It’s hard to tell.

But what isn’t hard to tell is that there are lots of people are using it to help manage a number of ailments, including:

• chronic pain
• inflammation
• anxiety
• insomnia
• seizures

There’s also the entourage effect.

It’s a proposed mechanism by which cannabis compounds act in conjunction with the endocannabinoid system in your body to gear the overall psychoactive effects of the plant, usually influenced by THC. My theory is that’s why most CBD products, like the one I’ve taken, include a token amount of THC—because they work better in tandem.

Here’s an interesting related science tidbit:

The fact that we have an “endocannabinoid system” indicates that our relationship with the cannabis plant goes back into evolutionary time. It means that somewhere in our genetic history, and by this mean I mean millions of years—not the hundreds of thousands our particular iteration of the species has been around—our relationship with this plant was an indicator for natural selection. It somehow aided in our survival.

My best guess? Pain relief.

And that brings us too:

The Friday morning challenge

Despite John Mayer’s braying commentary to the contrary: my body is not a wonderland.

It’s a bag of chemicals and pain loosely held together by bones and sinew frayed by years of both competitive and combat sports. My ankles and wrists ache with tendonitis, my rotator cuffs and shoulders are tight as a barricade, and my head is regularly suffused with a low grade headache—probably from some undiagnosed concussion from my years in football, rugby or martial arts—and I’d rather suffer than go the pharma-route for pain relief.

Today is especially bad because I have a new personal trainer, and we’re still in the “feeling each other out” phase of our relationship. So my daily pain scale rating, which usually sits around a four or a five (out of ten), is around a seven today. No amount stretching today is providing relief, so it’s time for a little chemical assistance.

My boss, Equity Guru’s own Chris Parry, has stocked our bar with a generous mix of alcohol and cannabis products for Friday afternoons when the job’s done and we can all kick back and pretend to be Don Draper from Mad Men. And one of those products is this beauty right here:

Here we have CBD spray elixir from Hexo (HEXO.NYSE).

In case you can’t read them, the stats on this bad boy are 2.35 mg of THC and 49 mg of CBD. One fifth of an accepted microdose of THC—enough to kickstart the entourage effect—and a good amount of CBD.

The opening spray tastes like bong water smells, but it’s short term and goes away. Then we wait. And wait. And then wait some more. I figure I’ll get some work done while I wait. My headache clears about an hour after spraying the vaguely bong-water flavoured mist on my tongue. My shoulders get warm and relax. The persistent ache in my shoulders and back ease off to a dull roar. The effect between my ears is lightheadedness, but it’s not a high (I know exactly what that feels like). Instead, it’s akin to the lightness one gets after dropping a heavy load when you feel like your body could float off into the atmosphere.

But does it actually work?

Now for the hard part: is this the placebo effect? Is this happening because I expect it to happen? I can’t answer that, unfortunately, but even if it is placebo effect, having something that blunts my daily pain from a seven to a four is welcome.

CBD apparently takes awhile to build up in our systems, and the last time I did CBD tinctures was roughly three weeks ago, so there’s a chance this could actually be the effect. But because it’s not an obvious alteration like THC or other drugs offer, then it’s not easy to tell necessarily if this is having an effect.

Except for the pain relief. It’s not as potent as Tramadol (which I was on for a surgery a few years back) effectively reducing my slashed-open body pain to a fraction of its agony. And it’s not an effective mute button on daily aches and pains like alcohol. It’s more like a dimmer switch. A non-addictive, non-psychoactive chemical remedy for what ails you.

So the jury’s still out on CBD. I’m on the downhill slide now. The dimmer switch is slowly turning back up on my pain a few hours after the spray, but it’s nowhere near a seven. Given the relative ease of the trip, the short-term availability of pain relief, and (at least so far) the general lack of side effects, I hope that the science comes through and proves definitively that CBD is the real deal for pain relief.

Until then, though, there’s always this for when the pain gets too much:

—Joseph Morton