Walk into the CBD Kratom shop on the corner of Damen and Dickens in Bucktown and you’ll find pill bottles, containers of balm and lotions, and small glass jars full of oil neatly arranged in tall glass display cases. They’re all advertised as CBD extracts, one of the primary chemical ingredients in marijuana.
So what gives?
“The law should be that CBD is either illegal or legal,” says Rod Knight, an attorney and marijuana reform advocate based in Asheville, North Carolina. “But what’s happened is the law has evolved on multiple fronts over time and it hasn’t grown up together. There’s not a top-down policy. It’s confusing.”
“CBD is so new and really just gaining popularity in the last two years,” says Dustin Shroyer, chief operations officer for Revolution Enterprises, a state-licensed medical marijuana cultivator. “We are just now starting to learn what its true potential is.” But the research is scant, and, Shroyer says, “mainly what we know about CBD comes from people using it and saying what it’s doing for them.” (Shroyer also notes that the CBD products his company produces for the state’s medical marijuana market also contain varying levels of THC, which is thought to have an impact on the efficacy of the drug.)
CBD Kratom owner David Palatnik operates out of two locations—his first shop in Bucktown and a recently opened second location in Andersonville. At both shops, patrons can select from a variety of CBD-infused products, from $4 lollipops to capsules, lotions, and oils.
“It takes someone like me, with a seven or eight pain level, down to a three or four,” he says.
