Grant: Cat. Gr.: Pop. Health Interv. Res. on Legalis. of Cannabis - Dev. Data Infrastru

Next summer, the Canadian government is making it legal to buy and use marijuana. The effect that this will have on how much marijuana Canadians use and how often they use it is not known. Information on the long-term impacts of marijuana on health and social issues is also lacking. We need data on individuals who buy and use marijuana so that we can develop programs and policies that will protect and support Canadians. Our study will look at how we can collect those data and link them to the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy's Data Repository, a large database of information from health, social services, and the justice system. The information from individuals would be linked across these sectors with privacy protections in place, so that their identities would never be known. This would allow us to study how marijuana use patterns are changing and what effect they have on Canadians' well-being. We will look at two different ways to collect data that can be linked to the Repository. We will work with a digital media firm to design a system for collecting data every time a person buys marijuana. The system would collect some personal information from the customer (e.g., age, sex and postal code) and information about the amount and type of marijuana sold. Our second strategy is to collect this kind of information using surveys. This would give us detailed information about how much and what kind of marijuana people are using. Data from both of these sources would be linked to the Repository in such a way that the individual people cannot be identified. The Manitoba Centre for Health Policy will partner with other researchers and policy makers from different levels of government to ensure the project's findings fill the gap in what we know about cannabis use in Canada. The team will use the findings to build a stable, cost-effective data collection system to study marijuana use patterns and the effect of marijuana use on health and social issues.