How Chanelle McCoy is trying to make CBD affordable for all
We know how much it costs to make. We know how cheap the raw material is. Chanelle McCoy’s view is that big pharma firms have made CBD oil inaccessible, writes Andy Martin
Chanelle McCoy doesn’t have to look far for her biggest influence and inspiration, she is married to him.
Champion jockey AP McCoy has fallen off and broken his bones approximately 700 times but he always gets back on his horse.
“He has the will to win,” she says. “That rubs off on you. He never accepts defeat.”
That brand of resilience has come in handy in the realm of pharmaceuticals and specifically in launching Pureis Ultra Pure CBD, dedicated to the virtues of cannabidiol, the non-addictive, non-high-inducing component of the cannabis plant.
I should be using her proper form of address – Lady McCoy – but she asks me to call her Chanelle, so I will. She was born in Galway, one of five children to entrepreneurial parents. They had a pharmaceutical company specialising in veterinary products and she worked sweeping floors and stocking shelves from around the age of eight. And she learned to drive a forklift truck, too, before going off to Dublin to study marketing and take a Masters in Business Administration at Trinity College. It was when she set up the Horse Racing Society at college (for which she shrewdly obtained sponsorship from Guinness) that she met AP at Punchestown Races.
She always thought she would go back to the family business but her parents told her (in the nicest possible way) to get experience elsewhere. She worked as a sales rep for Wyeth (that would become Pfizer) in Slough. She says: “That’s where you learn to be resilient. It’s character-building going around surgeries and pharmacies when most people don’t really want to see you.”
Eventually drawn back to the family pharmaceuticals business, she concentrated on generic, off-patent, drugs to treat heart conditions and depression, selling them to 96 countries. It was only when she set up Chanelle McCoy Health in collaboration with pharmacologist Caroline Glynn that she came to take an interest in CBD or cannabidiol – which is not talking about rolling anything, having a puff, inhaling deeply and laughing your head off at something that was never funny.
What really got her attention was the children suffering from epilepsy who were finding relief and improvement in their condition from taking CBD and yet the government persisted in banning it.
She says: “We were motivated by listening to parents. It was working but neither the Irish nor UK governments would grant licences.” Some of the parents were forced to sell up and move to Holland.
Now it is possible to get CBD on prescription but – and it’s a very big but – there is only one licensed producer in this country and the price means that the NHS severely limits the number of children who can have it. McCoy is a straight-shooter when it comes to the industry. She accuses pharma companies of being greedy: “We know how much it costs to make. We know how cheap the raw material is. My view is that they’ve made it inaccessible.”
She says CBD should be licensed for the treatment of pain and anxiety too: “It’s a much better alternative to opioids because it’s non-addictive.”
She insists on the difference between cannabidiol and tetrahydracannabidol – THC – the psychoactive component of cannabis that might have a separate role in medicine. She says: “People in government are ignorant of the distinction: they need to educate themselves.”
You don’t smoke Pureis. Their CBD is a food supplement taken either as a capsule or in liquid form and it’s already sold here (at Boots and Holland & Barrett) and in the US. It’s backed by clinical studies and ticks all the health safety boxes and has received the Novel Food validation from the EU and the UK.
Chanelle says: “There are a lot of cowboys, 55 percent of the products on the UK and Ireland markets have illegal levels of THC.”
The Pureis cannabidiol is not, in fact, extracted from cannabis: it’s produced purely synthetically, in a way that mimics the chemical structure of the therapeutic part of cannabis. The advantage of doing it this way is that you don’t accidentally pick up a certain amount of THC to go along with it. They guarantee not just zero THC but no toxins or pollutants of any kind – hence the name. Maybe they could have called it the Real McCoy.
Ultimately, Chanelle’s ambition is to market CBD as a high-dosage medicine as well as a low-dosage food supplement. She agrees that solving people’s problems is a good way of making money but, then again, she has enough money and it’s more about making the right product available to the greatest number. She says: “For us, it’s values before dollars, not the other way round.”
She argues that the fact that CBD helps to reduce inflammation means that it can have a positive impact on a whole range of different conditions, including notably insomnia and fibromyalgia. Clinical studies continue but she says: “We hope to be the second in the world to get it registered as a medicine.”
In 2015, in the wake of the success of her pharmaceutical business in Ireland, McCoy was invited to become the third female Dragon on the Irish Dragons’ Den. She says she had one golden rule: “Never invest in a business you know nothing about.” She was tempted once to go against her own advice by a gaming venture but she held out. Fortunately, the stuff she does know about still leaves her with a lot of options.
But she comes back to the question of getting CBD to the maximum number of possible beneficiaries. One thing that is going to help Pureis is having some well-known faces as brand ambassadors, including actor Martine McCutcheon, who suffers from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, Mike Tindall from the realm of rugby, who must have a few aches and pains, and finally Sir AP McCoy himself – 20 times a champion jockey and 700 times a casualty. I imagine Mr McCoy might have found it hard to turn down Mrs McCoy.
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