CBD and the law: why nobody tells you what it is good for.

Is CBD listed in the Dutch Opium Act?

No. The lists of the Opium Act include THC, not cannabidiol. That difference is at the heart of the whole legal situation: possessing and trading THC falls under criminal law, while CBD falls outside it and therefore comes under the ordinary rules for food.

What does count is how much THC a product contains. A hemp extract naturally contains traces, and those can be removed during production. How much a specific product contains is not something you read on the pack, but in the batch report. More about that distinction is on the page about CBD and THC.

What does novel food status mean?

This is where it gets messy, and most web shops skip this part. The European Commission regards cannabinoids as novel food: foods that were hardly eaten in the EU before 1997 and therefore have to be assessed before they can officially be placed on the market.

For CBD, that assessment is still not complete. Cannabidiol is not on the Union list of authorised novel foods. More than two hundred applications have been submitted, a handful of which are being assessed by EFSA, and in February 2026 the Commission ended a number of procedures without amending the Union list. That is not a rejection of CBD as such, but it isn't an authorisation either.

What did happen in February 2026: EFSA published a provisional safe intake for the first time. That is a scientific reference point, not an approval; it says something about amounts, not about whether the product may be on the market.

Meanwhile, the products are on the shelves. That is the split this market is in: in practice, sales are not actively fined, but formally the authorisation is not settled. We think you have a right to know that as a buyer, even though it isn't a comfortable story, and even though we sell these products ourselves.

Why may a seller say nothing about health?

Because legally, CBD is a food, and food falls under the European regulation on nutrition and health claims. In short: you may only mention a health effect if that effect has been officially approved and is on a list. For CBD there is nothing on that list. So every sentence about sleep, pain, stress or recovery is prohibited, however carefully you phrase it.

On top of that comes a second prohibition. If you claim that a product prevents, treats or cures a disease, you are in effect calling it a medicine, and then the rules for medicines apply: authorisation, a clinical dossier, the whole process. A supplement that presents itself that way is in breach.

That is why nowhere on this site will you read what CBD is supposedly good for. Not because we don't know anything, but because we aren't allowed to say it, and others say it anyway. How we handle sources and claims is described in our editorial policy.

So what can a seller tell you?

Facts about the product. The composition, the amount of CBD, the carrier used, the THC result from the laboratory, the origin of the hemp, the storage instructions. Exactly the things on this site.

Can you take CBD abroad?

That differs per country, and sometimes per state or province. Some countries ban all cannabis products, even without THC. Others use a limit of their own that differs from the Dutch one. We make no statements about that: check with the authorities of the country you are travelling to before you leave, and take the batch report along as proof of the composition.

Are these rules going to change?

Probably. The novel food assessment is ongoing, and its outcome will decide whether, and under what conditions, CBD is officially authorised. We review this page every quarter, and the date of the last review is at the bottom of the editorial policy. If you see something here that is out of date, let us know.

You can go back to the basics through the CBD overview.