Grant: Project Grant

In October 2018, the Cannabis Act legalized recreational cannabis in Canada. The Act had two goals: to eliminate the illegal cannabis market and to reduce the use of cannabis by young Canadians. There are benefits to legalization such as eliminating harms from the criminalization of cannabis possession and increasing government revenue. However, cannabis use has been linked to health harms including addiction, mental health problems like psychosis, and poisonings. Policy makers wanting to minimize cannabis harms can draw on decades of research looking at the best way to regulate the sale of legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco. This research has found that when more stores sell alcohol and tobacco, people tend to use more of these substances, resulting in more health harms. Determining whether a similar relationship exists for cannabis has important implications for the goal of reducing use of cannabis by youth. To investigate this relationship, our research team will collect the location and hours of operation of all stores selling cannabis in Canada over a four-year period. We will track the evolving cannabis retail environment for important measures such as density of stores and concentration in low-income areas. In Ontario, cannabis retail stores were chosen by a random lottery, allowing us to compare people who live close to a store that was chosen vs. those that live close to a lottery applicant that was not chosen. We will then use databases containing records of all emergency department visits and hospitalizations in Ontario to see whether individuals who live near a store selling cannabis are more likely to have a health care visit caused by cannabis compared to those who do not. We will work with health and government officials at the local, provincial, and national level to communicate the results of our research and help design stronger policy related to regulating how and where we sell cannabis.