A recent study on information sources for cannabis-related information and the average American’s trust in such brought back some interesting results.
The study, funded by the NIH and Legacy Health, is called Cannabis-related information sources among US residents: A probability-weighted nationally representative survey.
The study entailed surveying Americans, across various ages, and locations, with the participants being 51% female and only 27% reported cannabis use in the previous year.
Their results on trusted sources were quite telling:
The most common information sources used were friends/family (35.6%), websites (33.7%) […] Conversely, the least common information sources were […] government agencies (4.7%), and medical cannabis caregivers (4.4%).
The paper also addresses the lack of education that medical professionals have around hemp, cannabis, and the endo-cannabinoid system in humans:
Surveys and qualitative studies demonstrate that many physicians and medical students desire further relevant training (especially during medical school), but only 9% of medical schools in 2016 offered medical cannabis-specific curricula. As such, our findings suggest that in addition to conversations about cannabis occurring outside clinical settings, insufficient physician education may exacerbate misinformation about cannabis.
Now, this study is just another piece of data, it doesn’t “prove” anything, and it suffers from many of the issues that surveys & self-reporting always do, along with potential concerns participants may have had because of legal concerns.
Be that as it may, it sure seems like the general public is making their opinions on cannabis, and on the Big Pharma establishment, quite clear.
Read the whole paper:
https://jcannabisresearch.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42238-024-00249-5
Journal Reference:
Boehnke, K.F., Smith, T., Elliott, M.R. et al. Cannabis-related information sources among US residents: A probability-weighted nationally representative survey. J Cannabis Res 6, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42238-024-00249-5
