Octanol is an alcohol with a chain of eight carbon atoms and one OH group, and it has a molecular formula of C8H18O. Octanol is often used in research and industrial chemistry as a perfume and flavor additive to food and beverages. Octanol is also an industrial solvent, surfactant, foam control agent, and biodiesel additive. There are many terpenes in cannabis with potent anti-inflammatory properties, of which octanol is one. These terpenes can increase cannabis’ therapeutic potential, and octanol, in particular, may increase the bioavailability (absorption rate and circulation) of THC inside the body.

What Does Octanol Do?
Octanol is a naturally occurring fatty alcohol in many plants, including mint, lavender, cannabis, hops, tea, oats, and ginger. The most commonly occurring isomers are 1-octanol, 2-octanol, and 3-octanol. Due to its strong odor, octanol is frequently used as an additive to perfumes, adding a note described as “sweet,” “woody,” “herbal,” and “earthy.”  It’s also added to foods to give a fatty, mushroom taste. Fatty alcohols are long, straight hydrocarbon chains with single alcohol at one end. This creates a polar structure at one end and nonpolar at the other, similar to fatty acids. 1-Octanol, also referred to as caprylic alcohol or n-octanol, is very similar to the fatty acids found in the human body. This has led to using 1-octanol as a model chemical for testing the solubility of chemical compounds in the human body, called the partition coefficient.

Compounds with a higher partition 1-octanol/water coefficient are more easily absorbed into the body’s cells. In contrast, compounds with a lower 1-octanol/water coefficient may have difficulty reaching their intended target.
The high similarity of 1-octanol to human cell membranes causes it to be particularly soluble in the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane. Including 1-octanol in the cell membrane alters membrane permeability, allowing other chemicals to enter the cell more easily. This causes other drugs, such as nicotine, to be more effective when combined with n-octanol. This increased membrane permeability may explain why 1-octanol has been shown to increase the anti-inflammatory and pain-reducing effects of ⍺-pinene and linalool in what’s known as the entourage effect. All three of these chemicals are present in cannabis, making it likely that they’re partially responsible for reducing pain and inflammation when cannabis products are consumed.

As 1-octanol increases the uptake of most chemicals, it can be assumed that the natural presence of 1-octanol in cannabis is beneficial. However, it’s challenging to detect the presence of 1-octanol using gas chromatography because 1-octanol is often used as the solvent in the procedure.
This has led to an absence of information on whether 1-octanol is present in all cannabis strains and, if so, in what concentrations. Although the presence of 1-octanol and 3-octanol has been detected in at least one strain (cultivar) of cannabis, currently, no strains of cannabis are marketed as containing octanol.