Conversations can inspire, disrupt, enamour, even break down completely. In this case, it lingered. Relentlessly so.
Best Friend has been living with chronic pain and inflammation. Wanting to help in any way I could, I suggested they try CBD oil, simply as a response to the body’s need for care, as many people I know have found it relieving. Their response was immediate and assured: CBD does not have scientific support for pretty much anything it is claimed to do, but I am always happy to try cannabis, followed by the often-defusing zany face emoji.
I responded: That may or may not be helpful to know. No emoji from me, just ambiguity. It was a moment that I eagerly wanted to delve into, rather than defuse, but not just yet. I needed time to let a few questions simmer. Whose science? Whose support? Whose claims?
Now, Best Friend is, well, as best as friends can be. We take pride in being brutally honest with each other. Best Friend is trained as a scientist, deeply committed to evidence, method, and the careful discipline of doubt. It is among the reasons I admire them. It is also, sometimes, what I find myself pushing against. When Best Friend the Scientist speaks, they speak with the confidence of a tradition that has learned to trust only what it can measure.
I am no scientist. But I know enough to question who gets to decide what counts as knowledge. Knowledge that does not need to justify itself in the language of laboratories.
I am a sociologist. I was not trained in laboratories or clinical trials, but in listening to people, to histories, to communities that have survived long before Western science learned to name survival as resilience. I am a South African of Indian descent, raised in a context where healing is rarely an individual pursuit and rarely divorced from spirit, land, or relationship. It is where medicine is not always a pill you take or a clinical procedure you undergo, but a way of living that you practice, through food, ritual, touch, community, and building immunity collectively. These ways of knowing are often dismissed as unscientific because they do not belong to the institutions that have claimed authority over truth.
However, let us not forget that the self-claimed authority of Western science also has a long history of being wrong or incomplete. Smoking was not conclusively linked to cancer until long after people were already living with its devastating effects. Pain experienced by women and other marginalized genders has routinely been minimized or dismissed, with conditions such as endometriosis or chronic pain syndromes taking years, sometimes decades, to be taken seriously. Homosexuality, meanwhile, was classified as a psychiatric illness until 1991, despite generations of queer people knowing themselves to be healthy, whole, and fully human.
In many ways, Western science has had to play catch-up with realities and truths that people have been living with for centuries. Many plant-based medicines, including cannabis, have been used for more than 5,000 years across African, Arab, Asian, and Indigenous American societies[1].
The fact that these practices were not validated through Western scientific institutions does not mean they lacked rigor. It often means they were excluded, dismissed, or actively suppressed. This is largely because Western science has positioned itself as universal while being culturally specific, historically contingent, and deeply entangled with colonial power.
So, when Best Friend the Scientist says CBD does not have scientific support for pretty much anything it is claimed to do, that claim depends entirely on defining science as post-20th-century Western pharmacology, while disregarding thousands of years of empirically grounded plant medicine.
Western science’s extraction of CBD from cannabis reflects a methodological preference for isolating variables. Indigenous knowledge systems, by contrast, work with emergence, or the understanding that effects arise from complex interactions rather than single agents[2]. While CBD as an isolated compound is a modern scientific construct, the effects now attributed to CBD were long accessed through whole-plant cannabis practices that were empirically developed, observed, refined, and transmitted across generations in many Global South societies[3].
Best Friend therefore has a valid point, narrowly, but I see the logic of their argument within the terms they were using. CBD, as an isolated compound extracted and studied through Western biomedical frameworks, does indeed have a limited and uneven evidence base. But this precision is also revealing. CBD is not a timeless substance waiting to be discovered. It is a product of Western science’s tendency to fragment plants into marketable molecules. What Best Friend was, perhaps unintentionally, saying is that isolated CBD as a molecule[4], studied through modern clinical trials shows limited and uneven evidence. Whole cannabis, as a lived, embodied experience, is empirically persuasive to them.
That distinction actually supports my broader critique because it exposes how Western science fragments what older knowledge systems held holistically. And what this holistic knowledge has held for centuries, is that medicinal plants such as cannabis, inclusive of the CBD component, have brought healing patterns of relief, calm, reduced inflammation, and restored balance.
Now, some might call this irresponsible or dangerous. Some might belittle this to practices of superstition or hallucinatory thoughts. Others might even dismiss this as outright foolishness and delusion.
But hey, who am I to judge? I’m no scientist.
Written by Merlin Ince
[1] Archaeobotanical evidence of the use of medicinal cannabis in a secular context unearthed from south China
Marginal Identity 