Responsible CBD companies working to help adults, keep products away from children | Opinion
While serving in the U.S. Army as a combat medic, I received a diagnosis of chronic insomnia. I had tried everything, over the counter remedies and prescription drugs alike. Nothing was really helping, and the side effects from pills were giving me more health problems.
It wasn’t until 2019, when I came across hemp-derived CBD products, that I experienced natural sleep again. It saved my life.
Now, it’s my profession. I founded ZAR Wellness, a health and wellness company that specializes in hemp-derived compounds or cannabinoids. I want people to understand the distinction between companies that are doing ethical business in medical cannabis and those that are not.
State Rep. Stephanie Klick, a Fort Worth Republican who chairs the House Public Health Committee, recently wrote in the Star-Telegram that “purveyors of these products see our kids as their best potential customers, even though they endanger their health and put them in grave jeopardy of disciplinary actions, felony charges, enrollment in alternative schools and permanent marks on their record. And currently, there’s nothing stopping them from setting up shop next door to our schools.”
The state should do whatever it can to weed out these bad actors. But we shouldn’t paint all cannabis companies with the same broad brush.
At ZAR Wellness, we are not interested in getting our clients high. We want to improve their daily quality of life with high quality hemp-derived products that are effective for ailments such as anxiety, pain, sleep issues, post-traumatic stress and depression without causing severe side-effects.
We had to create our own brand so we could keep an eye on the quality of our products from seed to shelf. Unfortunately, the market is saturated with poor quality and dangerous products, especially aimed at children.
At ZAR Wellness, we set the standard with child-proof packaging. We do not use packaging and images that entice children. We check our clients’ identities to ensure that only adults 21 and older can purchase psychoactive products.
We ensure that our clients are educated on how the endocannabinoid system works, how to feed it best and achieve results based on their ailments. On average, we spend 20-30 minutes with each new client to ensure that they are comfortable with the education we have provided them, their products and the dosage for each product. We also follow up with our clients to see if their dosage needs to be tweaked to get the optimum benefits out of their supplement.
In 2019 when hemp-derived products changed my life for the better, I adopted the mission of bringing these natural products to more military veterans suffering from all types of physical and mental health challenges. One out of every three clients of ours is a veteran across our twenty-four locations in the state.
In the past three years, thousands of veterans have used our products to get off of opiods and other harmful pharmaceutical products. We provide a daily 22% discount for our veterans in honor of “Mission 22,” which represents the 22 veterans who commit suicide every day on average.
Unfortunately, I lost four young colleagues and friends to suicide in the Army, and I myself almost became a statistic. Hemp-derived CBD products made a huge difference in my life, and it has proven to do the same for others as well, if done the right way.
Asad Shalami is founder and chief executive of ZAR Wellness, which has 11 locations around the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He lives in Plano.
