Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Thursday that Rite Aid is likely to run into regulatory trouble with its decision to begin selling cannabidiol cosmetic products.
Rite Aid had announced Thursday that it planned to sell CBD in creams, lotions, and lip balms this month in 200 stores across Washington and Oregon. The chain will not file drug claims and instead call their products cosmetics.
“It’s hard to understand how they’re going to sell it as a cosmetic without making drug claims around those products,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.” “If they’re making drug-like claims that it helps treat pain or other things, they’re probably going to trip over a federal regulatory line pretty quickly.”
CBD and cannabis-derived products have become popular nationwide, sometimes making claims that they can alleviate pain or cure illness.
Gottlieb, though, who left the FDA last week, suggested that the benefits were oversold. “The hype has gotten ahead of the science right now,” he said.
“A lot of uses we’re seeing in these consumer products that are being put forward right now, they don’t look very credible … There’s certainly no science to support it that would rise to the level of FDA satisfaction,” Gottlieb said.
CBD is not intoxicating, but the FDA has not approved it to be added to food or into supplements.
THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the intoxicating property in marijuana, is also not under FDA regulation. The FDA regulates what are “over the line claims” — broad claims that marijuana can treat anxiety, acute pain, or even chronic illness.
“Unfortunately, people would look to the FDA to be the regulator of choice and you’d regulate THC as a drug and the recreational component under [Center for Tobaccos],” Gottlieb said. “I don’t think that’s preferable, I think that’d be a bad outcome.”
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