phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES JUNE 24TH – JUNE 30TH, 2021 State Licensed Dispensaries & Doctor Certifications | CANNABIS | Erin Stone from Pixabay Vets, Pets, and CBD Here’s what to know about treating your four-legged friends. BY ROBRT L. PELA B etty Travers threw her son out of the house when she found a bag of weed under his mat- tress. “That was 1978 or so,” she remembers. “I told him I wouldn’t have any drug users in my house. And now here I am feeding pot to my kitty. It’s a new and different world.” Actually, Travers, a retired MVD worker, is giving her cat CBD, which unlike the marijuana beneath her son’s mattress doesn’t get anybody high. She buys her CBD oil from Local Joint, a dispensary near her Tempe home. It’s the first medi- cine that’s done anything for Trulaine, her 14-year-old cat who suffers from a seizure disorder. “I tried everything the doctor could think of,” says Travers of Trulaine’s vet. “Nothing was working.” Then her cat sitter told her she gives her dog CBD biscuits for his arthritis. “And I thought, ‘What the heck?’” Those dog biscuits are sold at Bonnie’s Barkery, whose owner, Mike Murray, also wants to emphasize that his products do not contain marijuana and that the pets that receive them aren’t getting high. “It’s important to understand that mari- juana contains THC, a chemical compound that’s harmful to animals,” says Murray. “Our biscuits contain CBD, which is used safely and medicinally for pets...I always recommend starting slow with small doses, but if they take too much, they’ll just ex- crete out what they don’t use.” Hemp — which is defined legally as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — has been marketed to pet owners for years. But the trend has picked up as cannabis becomes more and more normal- ized: CBD products being sold at drug stores, states legalizing recreational mari- juana. According to a recent Forbes report, hemp-based CBD products for pets will make up five percent of CBD’s total sales by 2025. In Arizona, local dispensaries and pet food stores and bakeries offer CBD edibles, oils, and topicals for Fido and Fluffy, as do many local veterinarians. But while retail- ers are happy to bark about the benefits of pet-specific CBD, many animal doctors re- main shy about copping to cannabis use with their patients. “For vets, hemp is right up there with heroin on the Drug Enforcement Adminis- tration schedule,” says a Phoenix-based mobile animal doctor who didn’t want her name in print. She recommends CBD to pet owners and says many other vets she knows do, too. “We’re just not making a medical record of it when we do,” she says, because, “The DEA can fine me $10,000 for every time I offer CBD to anyone with four legs.” The FDA’s main concern seems to be the toxicity of cannabis for domesticated animals. Until the FDA studies the >> p 51 49
