Walk into almost any hemp shop and you will find cannabigerol, or CBG, sold with adjectives: calming, balancing, restorative. What you will not find is much evidence about how people actually use it once they get it home — how much they take, when they take it, what they are trying to fix, and whether they think it works. A new survey from Washington State University is the most detailed attempt so far to answer those questions from the consumer’s side of the counter.
The study, led by Erika Lutz and Carrie Cuttler with co-authors Dustin Sulak, Leigh Vinocur and Ethan Russo, was published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs on 15 September 2026 and is open access at https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2026.2727651. It asked 239 American adults who had used CBG or its acidic precursor CBGA in the previous two years to describe their habits in detail, and to rate both how much the compound helped each condition and how satisfied they were with that help.
Key Takeaways
The clearest finding is that most people in this survey were not taking CBG for fun. Among current users, 91.2% said they used it for medical reasons alone, and the single most common goal was sleep: 62% used CBG or CBGA for insomnia or disturbed sleep, followed by inflammatory chronic pain at 44%, anxiety at 33%, episodic pain at 29% and neuropathic pain at 28%. Across almost every condition, respondents rated the effect somewhere between “slightly improves” and “much improves”, and their satisfaction landed between “somewhat” and “mostly” satisfied. The typical daily dose was modest, around 10 to 12 mg of CBG, with effects reported within 15 to 60 minutes and lasting four to six hours. More than half reported no side effects at all, and 96.1% said the products did not make them feel intoxicated. The important caveats are that this was a self-selected group of customers of one hemp company, mostly white, mostly women, with an average age near 59, and that the survey measured what people believe, not what a placebo-controlled trial would show.
Who Answered, and Why That Matters
Between January 2024 and May 2025 the researchers recruited participants through the customer email list and monthly webinars of Healer Hemp, a Maine-based producer. That choice was deliberate: because most respondents were buying products with known, laboratory-characterised amounts of CBG and CBGA, the team could report real doses instead of guessing at what was in an unlabelled tincture. The trade-off is that only 24.4% of respondents had used products from any other manufacturer, so the picture is of one company’s customers rather than of CBG users in general.
The cleaning process was strict. Of 537 submissions, 106 were removed as duplicates, 177 for incomplete answers, six for failing an automated bot check and nine for finishing the survey in under 50 seconds. The 239 who remained ranged in age from 21 to 92, with a mean of 58.83 years. Women made up 71.2% of the sample, men 26.7%, and 89.12% of participants were white. A striking 38.14% were retired. This is not the demographic that dominates cannabis marketing, and the authors note it is a very different profile from the earlier 2021 survey by Russo and colleagues, which had a nearly even split between men and women and a mean age of 45. One possible reading, which the researchers offer cautiously, is that younger adults gravitate to high-THC products while older adults look for something that does not intoxicate.
Another detail worth noticing: these were not people new to cannabis. Fully 83.3% also used products containing more than 0.3% THC, and 51.3% used cannabis at least once a day. Almost everyone, 99.6%, also used hemp products regularly. CBG, in other words, was rarely someone’s only cannabinoid, which makes it harder to attribute any given effect to CBG alone.
How People Actually Take CBG
Of the 239 respondents, 217 were still using CBG or CBGA at the time of the survey. The 22 who had stopped gave reasons that will be familiar to anyone who has tried a supplement: 36.4% felt nothing, 27.3% found it too expensive, 22.7% had side effects, and one person could not find it.
The habits of the 217 active users are the practical heart of the paper. Most took CBG once a day (63.13%), a further 28.57% twice a day, and a small minority more often. The evening was the favourite time: 78.8% used it then, 47.0% in the morning and 27.7% in the afternoon, with the overlap confirming that a good share of people dosed more than once. Nearly half, 43.32%, had used CBG more than 100 times, and 29.03% had been using it for one to two years, so this is largely a group of experienced, settled users rather than curious first-timers.
The products were unglamorous. CBG drops were used by 42.86%, CBG gummies by 42.40% and CBG capsules by 17.51%, with CBGA drops and gummies used by roughly a quarter and a fifth respectively. On a typical use day people reported an average of 12.31 mg of CBG and 4.44 mg of CBGA. By product, the mean CBG dose was 10.23 mg from drops, 11.49 mg from gummies and 12.60 mg from capsules. These are small numbers compared with the 20 mg used in the same group’s placebo-controlled anxiety trial and the 50 mg CBG products sometimes sold online, and the authors flag that working out a true minimum effective dose is still an open task.
Timing reports were consistent. Among those who noticed an effect, 40.20% said it arrived within 30 to 60 minutes and 31.66% within 15 to 30 minutes. For 61.62% the effect lasted four to six hours. That matches a separate pharmacokinetic study which found that CBG blood levels after a 25 mg oral dose peaked around 30 to 45 minutes and stayed elevated for roughly four to six hours — and which also found that a high-fat meal dramatically increased how much CBG reached the bloodstream, a factor the survey did not measure.
What People Use CBG For, and How Well They Think It Works
The survey offered a long list of medical conditions and asked respondents to tick every one they used CBG or CBGA to manage, then rate it twice: once on a scale from minus three (very much worse) to plus three (very much improved), and once for satisfaction on the same seven-point range.
Sleep led by a wide margin. Of 216 active users, 134 (62.04%) used CBG for insomnia or sleep problems, with a mean improvement score of 1.87 and a satisfaction score of 1.88 — both sitting just below “much improved” and “mostly satisfied”. Inflammatory chronic pain came next at 44.44%, with improvement rated 1.65 and satisfaction 1.71. Anxiety, endorsed by 33.33%, actually earned the highest scores of the top five, with improvement at 2.03 and satisfaction at 2.08. Episodic pain (28.70%) and neuropathic chronic pain (28.24%) rounded out the top group, each scoring in the mid-1.5 range on both measures.
Further down the list the pattern broadly held. Depression was reported by 18.52% with an improvement score of 1.80; post-traumatic stress disorder by 16.20% at 1.89; fibromyalgia by 14.35% at 1.77; and inflammatory bowel disease by 12.50% at 1.70. The authors single out IBD because it echoes the 13.4% who reported the same use in the 2021 survey, and because there is a growing body of animal research on CBG and intestinal inflammation. The lowest scores were for cancer symptoms (0.77 improvement among 13 people) and glaucoma (0.88 among eight), which is a useful reminder that respondents were not simply rating everything highly.
Beyond specific conditions, all participants were asked whether CBG changed their memory, stress, anxiety and mood. On a scale from minus two to plus two, memory came out essentially unchanged at 0.17, while mood (0.73), anxiety (1.08) and stress (1.11) each showed a slight perceived improvement.
How does this compare with the same question asked five years earlier? In the 2021 Russo survey, anxiety was the top reason for use at 51.2%, chronic pain second at 40.9%, and sleep fourth at 30.7%. In the new sample sleep has moved to the front and anxiety to third. The two surveys used different recruitment routes and different products, so the shift may say as much about who buys from Healer as about CBG itself. Still, two independent snapshots of CBG users have now produced the same short list of reasons, in a different order.
Side Effects, Intoxication and the THC Question
Among the 217 who answered the side-effect question, 56.7% reported none at all. The most common complaints were dry mouth (18.89%), sleepiness (13.36%), dry eyes (11.06%) and increased appetite (7.83%), each rated on average as only “a little bit” distressing. A handful reported effects that could hint at impairment: unsteadiness (3.69%), racing heart (2.76%), light-headedness (2.76%), brain fog (2.30%) and one case of hallucinations. Headache was rated the most distressing side effect, but only two people reported it. Written-in additions included vivid dreams, memory problems, restlessness and diarrhoea, each from two or three respondents.
The same four leading side effects — dry mouth, sleepiness, dry eyes and appetite — topped the 2021 survey too. Back then the authors blamed the THC in poorly characterised products. This time the products were known to contain only 0.16 to 1.22 mg of THC, which the new paper says makes it plausible that CBG itself is responsible, though it cannot rule out a contribution from even those small amounts.
On the question that matters most to people who need to drive to work, 96.1% of 232 respondents said CBG did not make them feel intoxicated, and 94.0% of 235 said they felt safe to drive. Of the 14 who did not, nine described feeling sleepy or relaxed rather than high.
What This Survey Cannot Tell You
It bears repeating that every number above is a self-report. Nobody in this study took a placebo, nobody was measured objectively, and everyone was recruited because they had already chosen to buy CBG. People who found it useless were less likely to still be on the mailing list, let alone to spend 15 minutes filling in a questionnaire for a five-dollar gift card. The authors state this plainly and also acknowledge recall bias — asking people to remember how they felt over the past two years is not the same as measuring it.
The sample’s homogeneity is a second limit. Nearly nine in ten respondents were white, seven in ten were women, and most were in their late fifties or older. The findings may not transfer to younger, more diverse or less affluent users. Nor does the survey say anything about smoked or vaporised CBG, since these were almost entirely oral products.
Third, the funding. Healer Hemp paid for the study, one of the authors is Healer’s co-founder and medical director, and the corresponding author has received research funds from Healer and several other cannabinoid companies. This is disclosed in the paper and does not make the data wrong, but it is context a reader should carry.
Finally, the one clinical trial cited on CBG and sleep — the condition topping this survey — found no difference between CBG and placebo in veterans. The anxiety finding has better support from a small placebo-controlled trial, but the authors of both papers call for larger, more rigorous work before anyone treats these perceptions as established effects. If you want to understand the difference between consumer perception and controlled evidence across the whole cannabinoid family, our science-based guide to CBD walks through the same problem for a far more widely studied molecule.
Why Researchers Wanted This Data in the First Place
The stated purpose of the survey was not to prove CBG works. It was to give clinical trial designers what the authors call “ecologically valid” parameters: doses people actually take, the window in which they expect an effect, how long they expect it to last, which conditions they target, and which side effects to monitor. On that basis the paper’s closing recommendation to researchers is specific — test doses in the range of 10 to 15 mg, wait 30 to 60 minutes before measuring, expect effects to fade after four to six hours, and consider standardising meals, since dietary fat changes absorption.
That practical framing sits alongside a wider trend. A nationally representative US survey found that 18.4% of adults had heard of CBG and 5.2% had used it in the past year, making it the most popular non-intoxicating minor cannabinoid after CBD. The reasons people give for using it overlap heavily with the reasons Americans give for cannabis use in general, where chronic pain and other health conditions drive the most frequent use. What this survey adds is a level of dosing detail that most consumer research on cannabinoids lacks — and it could only add it because the products were properly characterised, a standard that much of the wider hemp market still fails to meet.
The one area where evidence is beginning to move beyond surveys is pain, which accounts for four of the top five reasons in this study. Earlier this month we covered a rodent study comparing pure CBG with a full-spectrum extract for inflammatory pain, in which CBG worked slowly but eventually restored normal sensitivity. Human trials on the same question do not yet exist. For now, the honest summary is that a few hundred experienced users say CBG helps them sleep and hurt less, that they take far less of it than the marketing might suggest, and that the science needed to confirm or refute them is still being designed — partly with this survey’s help.
FAQ
Insomnia or disturbed sleep was the top reason, cited by 62% of active users, followed by inflammatory chronic pain (44%), anxiety (33%), episodic pain (29%) and neuropathic chronic pain (28%). Depression, PTSD, migraine, fibromyalgia and inflammatory bowel disease each accounted for between roughly 12% and 19% of respondents.
The average reported daily dose was 12.31 mg of CBG and 4.44 mg of CBGA, with individual product averages between about 10 and 13 mg of CBG. Most people dosed once a day, usually in the evening, and reported noticing effects within 15 to 60 minutes that lasted four to six hours. These are consumer habits reported in a survey, not dosing recommendations.
According to the people surveyed, generally no. 96.1% reported no intoxication from hemp-derived CBG or CBGA products, and 94% said they did not feel too impaired to drive. A small number reported sleepiness or dizziness. The products in this study contained only trace THC, between 0.16 and 1.22 mg, which is relevant to that result.
Hemp-derived CBG products containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight fall under the federal definition of hemp established in the 2018 Farm Bill, but the US Food and Drug Administration has not approved CBG as a drug, a dietary supplement ingredient or a food additive, and individual states set their own rules on hemp-derived cannabinoids, which have been changing rapidly. Anyone with a practical question about a specific product should check current federal and state regulations and take qualified advice rather than relying on a general summary.
Disclaimer
This article reports on published scientific research for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation or legal advice. The study described relied on self-reported survey data from a self-selected group of consumers, was funded by a product manufacturer, and did not include a placebo control; its findings describe what respondents believed and should not be read as evidence that cannabigerol treats any condition. Cannabis, hemp and cannabinoid products are regulated differently across countries and regions, and their legal status can change. Readers with medical conditions, including sleep disorders, chronic pain or anxiety, should consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any decision about treatment and should never stop or alter prescribed medication on the basis of a news report.
