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Citations
... Until recently, the term "marijuana" had the same meaning for scientists and cannabis users, because marijuana flower was the main cannabis preparation available. Now, researchers use the terms "buds" or "flower" to differentiate herbal marijuana from other cannabis preparations, such as concentrates and edibles (Bidwell et al. 2020;D' Amico et al. 2020;Fedorova et al. 2019;Kilmer et al. 2013;Kruger and Kruger 2019). For example, two recent studies asked, "On a typical use day, how much marijuana flower/bud do you personally consume?" (D' Amico et al. 2020;Kilmer et al. 2013). ...
... Now, researchers use the terms "buds" or "flower" to differentiate herbal marijuana from other cannabis preparations, such as concentrates and edibles (Bidwell et al. 2020;D' Amico et al. 2020;Fedorova et al. 2019;Kilmer et al. 2013;Kruger and Kruger 2019). For example, two recent studies asked, "On a typical use day, how much marijuana flower/bud do you personally consume?" (D' Amico et al. 2020;Kilmer et al. 2013). Yet, it is unknown if "buds" and "flower" are terms that are familiar to cannabis users. ...
Background
Cannabis legalization has resulted in the proliferation of cannabis products. Participants’ familiarity with terms for these products may have implications for assessment, as unfamiliarity with particular terms may result in under-reports of use.
Methods
A convenience sample of 861 college students from one U.S. university completed a survey in the spring of 2020 about their familiarity with a variety of cannabis product terms and use of a variety of cannabis products.
Results
Participants varied in their familiarity with cannabis product terms. For example, with regard to terms for cannabis concentrates with very high concentrations of THC, 85% of participants reported being familiar with the term “wax pen or THC oil,” but only 27% reported being familiar with the term “butane hash oil (BHO)” (i.e., the oil that composes most concentrates). Moreover, of participants who reported use of concentrates based on selecting pictures of the products they had used ( n = 324, 40%), 99% ( n = 322) reported having seen a “wax pen or THC oil” based on a written list of product terms, whereas only 20% ( n = 65) reported having seen “butane hash oil (BHO).” This suggests that asking about use of “butane hash oil” use may result in lower rates of cannabis concentrate use than asking about use of “wax pen/THC oil.” With regard to terms for marijuana flower, 29% of participants ( n = 248) reported being unfamiliar with the term marijuana “buds or flowers.” Of participants who reported use of marijuana flower based on selecting pictures of the products they had used (38% of the sample, n = 329), only 86% ( n = 282) reported having seen marijuana “buds or flowers” based on a written list of product terms. This suggests that asking about use of marijuana “buds or flowers” use could result in under-reporting due to lack of familiarity with that term. Finally, when asked to select pictures of the cannabis product(s) that participants thought constituted “marijuana,” participants most commonly selected pictures of marijuana flower (93%), followed by wax pen/THC oil (57%) and edibles (49%).
Conclusions
Young adults vary in their familiarity with cannabis product terms, and some may under-report cannabis use in surveys that rely on written cannabis product terms. Young adults also differ in terms of which cannabis products they think constitute “marijuana.” Although participants’ familiarity with specific cannabis product terms in this sample may not generalize to other populations, results highlight the need for standardized surveys of cannabis use that incorporate pictures of cannabis products to overcome issues related to variability in familiarity with cannabis product terms.
... There are important limitations to each of these approaches, and many agencies today rely on triangulation of data from multiple approaches ONDCP, 2014;UNODC, 2021), but given the growth in survey methods and synthetic drugs the past two decades, demand side estimates have been receiving significantly more attention among academics (Armstrong, 2021;Caulkins et al., 2015Caulkins et al., , 2019Kilmer et al., 2013;Kilmer and Pacula, 2009;van Laar et al., 2013;Wilkins et al., 2002). ...
Background
Assessing the size of illicit drug markets is an important activity of many government agencies; however, the expenditure-based method for estimating market size relies on the relatively untested assumption that the cash value of the most recent purchase is representative of the average purchase amount. Using panel data, we test the representativeness of the most recent, modal and median purchase compared to the average purchase amount.
Methods
Data were drawn from a prior study that collected daily transaction-level purchase data from a sample of 120 people who were using heroin regularly. The same study participants completed two distinct two-week waves of data collection, separated by six months. T-tests and bootstrapping were used to detect differences within each wave between the average cash value of participant heroin purchases and the cash value of their most recent, modal and median heroin purchases.
Results
In both waves, we found (a) no evidence that the expected value of the most recent purchase differs from the expected value of the average purchase, and (b) the expected values of the modal and median purchases are smaller than the expected value of the average purchase. These results imply that estimates of total market size based on the modal or median purchase will suffer from a significant downward bias, but that estimates based on the most recent purchase will be unbiased.
Conclusions
We provide evidence in support of using the most recent (but not the modal or the median) purchase to estimate market size for heroin.
... Diese mussten daher anhand verfügbarer Daten aus anderen Ländern/Regionen oder aufgrund qualitativer Experteneinschätzungen approximiert werden. Einige vergleichbare Projekte in anderen Ländern haben sich entschieden, Schätzungen mit Hilfe von Bandbreiten vorzunehmen (Hajizadeh 2016;Haucap et al. 2018;Kilmer et al. 2013;Kilmer & Pacula 2009;Zobel et al. 2020). Auch Eurostat und die OECD empfehlen ein derartiges Vorgehen (Eurostat 2018;OECD 2002 Kurz zusammengefasst basieren die geschätzten Konsummengen auf dem selbstberichteten Konsumverhalten undmengen aus bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Umfragedaten für die Schweiz. ...
... In the case of marijuana products available on the Polish market, the mean values of 210 Po and 210 Pb activity concentration are the following: 12.1 and 3.1 mBq/g in cannabis plant, 4.2 and 0.85 mBq/g in cannabis hemp, 62.4 and 10.5 mBq/g in cannabis hash and 10.9 and 2.3 mBq/g in cannabis tea [11]. The rate of CBD cannabis consumption in Poland is not exactly known; the amount of the annual effective radiation dose used in the calculations was based on the average consumption of CBD cannabis in the USA, which was determined to 1 kg/y [40]. The annual marijuana hash uptake into the lungs of Polish smokers calculated on this basis is 1.02 Bq for 210 Po and 0.2 Bq for 210 Pb, and the value of the annual radiation dose from the decay of both radionuclides is 3.6 µSv, but for regular and heavy consumers the annual doses were estimated at 25 and 60 µSv, respectively. ...
This article contains and discusses the results of research on the source of polonium 210Po and radio-lead 210Pb in the human body of adults living in Poland. An adult inhabitant of Poland receives an effective annual radiation dose of 309 µSv from inhalation and absorption of 210Po and 210Pb. The main sources of both radionuclides in the body is cigarette and marijuana smoking. In terms of food, the consumption of fish, cereals, vegetables and fruit as well as mushrooms have the largest contribution to annual dose. This study highlights the importance of cigarette smoking and the growing importance of marijuana hash smoking as the main source of 210Po and 210Pb for adults living in Poland. The calculated dose that results from the decay of both radionuclides in body is 1/10 of the annual radiation dose received by a Polish inhabitant from natural sources (2.8 mSv) and is almost five times lower than the dose resulting from the inhalation of 222Rn.
... Im konservativen Szenario wird die Mitte beider Ansätze zugrunde gelegt. Für die Konsummengen pro Tag werden Schätzungen aus den USA zugrunde gelegt (Kilmer et al., 2013;Light et al., 2014), auf die sich im Übrigen auch der französische Sachverständigenrat für Wirtschaftsfragen in seiner Schätzung des potenziellen Steueraufkommens für Frankreich stützt (Conseil d'analyse économique, 2019). ...
... Participants also indicated how many times they use marijuana on the days they use it (Bogart et al., 2005;Ellickson et al., 2005). Quantity of marijuana use focused on flower/bud, asking, "On the days you use marijuana, on a typical use day, how much marijuana flower/bud do you personally consume?" (Kilmer et al., 2013). Response options ranged from 1 = "Less than 0.25g" to 10 = "More than 5g," and were re-coded using the mid-point of each response option to represent quantities in grams (e.g., "between 1 and 1.5g" re-coded to 1.25g) with a final range from 0.25 to 5 grams. ...
Objective:
Prior studies documenting more frequent and problematic use among young adults who have acquired medical marijuana (MM) cards have broadly compared those who use medically to those who use recreationally. Gaining a better picture of how health symptoms and problematic use vary both within those who have a MM card for specific condition domains and between those who do not have a MM card can provide key information for medical practitioners and states interested in adopting or updating MM policies.
Method:
The current study categorizes young adults authorized to use MM into three mutually exclusive groups based on endorsements of qualifying conditions: (1) Physical Health only (e.g., AIDS, arthritis, cancer; n = 34); (2) Behavioral Health only (e.g., anxiety, depression, sleep problems; n = 75); and (3) Multiple Conditions (a physical and behavioral health condition; n = 71). Multiple and logistic regression models examined differences across marijuana use, problems, mental health, physical health, and sleep quality for MM condition categories and for those that only use marijuana recreationally (n = 1,015).
Results:
After adjusting for socio-demographic factors (age, sex, sexual orientation, educational status, employment status, race/ethnicity, mother's education, prior intervention involvement in youth), MM card holders, particularly those with physical health or multiple health conditions, reported heavier, more frequent, and more problematic and risky marijuana use compared to those using recreationally. Despite this pattern, those in different MM condition categories were generally not found to be more symptomatic in domains of mental or physical health relevant to their respective conditions, compared to different category groups or to those using recreationally.
Conclusions:
Findings emphasize the importance of providers conducting a careful assessment of reasons for needing a card, along with use, to reduce potential harms while adding credibility to a medical movement with genuine promise of relief for many medical conditions.
... Second, we divided these quantities by the global estimates of the number of users of the two substances, thus obtaining estimates of the annual consumption per user. Third, for each country, we multiplied the estimated number of users by purity-adjusted estimated quantities of cocaine and heroin consumed by each user (Kilmer et al. 2013(Kilmer et al. , 2011Legleye, Lakhdar, and Spilka 2008;Wilkins, Bhatta, and Casswell 2002). Finally, we adjusted seizures for purity to make them comparable across countries before adding them to the total quantity of cocaine and heroin consumed (Paoli, Greenfield, and Reuter 2009). ...
There is a relative dearth of literature on both the effects of cross-border interdic-tions and the impact of different types of interventions on international drug trafficking. This study identifies the main trafficking routes for cocaine and heroin, along with comparing the disruptive effects induced by targeted and non-coordinated interventions. It adopts a social network approach to identify the routes along which cocaine and heroin are trafficked, and then simulates the impact of different interdiction strategies on these two trafficking networks. The findings indicate that targeting countries based on their respective positions in the networks, as opposed to on the basis of the quantity of drugs exchanged, is more likely to disrupt drug flows. More specifically, concentrating law enforcement resources on countries with several incoming or outgoing trafficking connections, or those countries that mediate between producer, transit and consumer countries, would appear to be particularly effective in this regard. Interventions focused on specific trafficking routes are also likely to be effective if these routes have high edge betweenness centrality scores. This study contributes to extant understanding on the vulnerability of cocaine and heroin international trafficking networks, and, moreover, demonstrates that empirically-driven strategies are potentially more effective at interdicting international trafficking than non-strategic and non-coordinated interventions.
... Smaller amounts of concentrates therefore have the ability to achieve a more potent effect (Loflin and Earleywine 2014;Stogner and Miller 2015). While such products are not a novelty, they have recently increased in both popularity and media scrutiny (Kilmer et al. 2013;Stogner and Miller 2015). The extraction of BHO from cannabis trimmings and the use of "dabs" is more complex than the use of flower products. ...
... Consistent with our findings, previous research shows that older age was associated with lower odds of concentrate use (Daniulaityte et al. 2017). Dabbing is becoming more common, with almost 40% of pastmonth cannabis users and 52% of daily/near-daily cannabis users in Washington state endorsing the technique (Kilmer et al. 2013). Concentrate use is especially prevalent among medical cannabis users, so as use becomes more widespread, it might also increase among older medical users (Al-Zouabi et al. 2018;Lankenau et al. 2017). ...
Cannabis use varies with age and gender, but less is known regarding specific product choices. Previous work suggests that older adults are inclined to stick to the more "classic" and familiar, while "novel" products are more likely to appeal to younger populations. We examined cross-sectional, retrospective data to determine whether the type of cannabis products used varied according to participant age (N = 1406, 71.3% female). The extensive list of products included: loose flower, pre-rolled joints, edibles, concentrates, oil vaporizers (vape pens), dry vaporizers, tinctures, topicals, and ingestible oils. Overall, rates of use for cannabis-infused ingestible oils, topicals, and tinctures are the lowest and show no age or gender-related differences. In contrast, the use of pre-rolled joints, vape pens, and edibles tends to decrease with age. Loose flower and dry vaporizer use also decrease with age, although less consistently. These age-related differences in product choices can facilitate prevention and treatment efforts toward specific populations. While harm-reduction efforts targeting loose flower and edible products would benefit all age groups, those targeting concentrates might focus only on younger users. On the other hand, learning about concentrates might be beneficial for older medical users due to their larger THC doses and rapid onset.
... Predictors. Using items from Kilmer et al. (2013), we determined cannabis sources by asking individuals "Where did you get the marijuana you used during the last year? (check all that apply)." ...
... All participants in the analytic sample (i.e., used cannabis in the past 30 days) and who indicated using cannabis at least once on days used were also asked quantity of cannabis use: "on a typical use day, how much marijuana flower/bud do you personally consume (don't include amount you may have shared)?" (Kilmer et al., 2013). Responses ranged from 1=< 0.25 gram (g) to 10=more than 5 grams. ...
... Those who reported not using marijuana at least once on typical use days used were given zero values for this item. We also asked how much money participants spent on cannabis products containing THC in the past month using an open-ended item for dollar amount (Kilmer et al., 2013). ...
Background
The ways in which young people learn about cannabis product availability and where they obtain cannabis products are important to understand for prevention and intervention efforts.
Methods
Young adults who reported past month cannabis use (N = 758) completed an online survey in 2018–2019 on how they obtained cannabis and the products they used in a newly legalized market in Los Angeles (mean age 21.6; 44% Hispanic, 27% white, 15% Asian).
Results
Overall, 59.1% obtained cannabis from recreational cannabis retailers (RCRs), 51.5% from family or friends, 39.1% from medical cannabis dispensaries (MCDs), and 5.5% from strangers or dealers in the past month. Compared to those getting cannabis from family or friends, those getting cannabis from MCDs or RCRs spent more money, used more cannabis products, were more likely to use alone, used greater quantities of bud/flower, and reported more consequences from use. Further, those obtaining cannabis from MCDs were more likely to screen positive for cannabis use disorder (CUD). For type of products, those obtaining cannabis from MCDs or RCRs were more likely to use joints, bongs, pipes, dabs, vape, and consume edibles relative to those obtaining from family or friends. Subgroup differences were found for both source patterns and cannabis-related outcomes. Males and those with a cannabis medical card reported spending more money on cannabis, using more types of products, and indicated more frequent use and greater CUD symptoms and consequences. Compared to Whites, Blacks spent more money on cannabis and used more products, and Hispanics reported using more products and greater quantities of cannabis bud/flower.
Conclusions
Findings highlight the different ways that young adults obtain cannabis, and how young adults with a medical cannabis card may be at greater risk for problems compared to young adults who use cannabis recreationally.
... The consistency of findings across various frequency levels of cannabis use strengthens inferences regarding the association of cannabis use patterns with alcoholassociated adverse effects. There are, however, systematic differences in the amount of the active compound consumed per day across different groups of users (Casajuana et al. 2016;Kilmer et al. 2013). Typically, those who use cannabis more days per month also tend to use more grams per day, which is a variable that we did not control for (Casajuana et al. 2016;Kilmer et al. 2013). ...
... There are, however, systematic differences in the amount of the active compound consumed per day across different groups of users (Casajuana et al. 2016;Kilmer et al. 2013). Typically, those who use cannabis more days per month also tend to use more grams per day, which is a variable that we did not control for (Casajuana et al. 2016;Kilmer et al. 2013). ...
Background
While the link between frequent cannabis use and alcohol use disorders is well documented, it is not clear whether alcohol drinkers who use cannabis less frequently are also vulnerable to alcohol use disorders. We estimate the association of frequency of past 12-months cannabis use with alcohol-associated adverse effects variables in the same time frame: alcohol dependence, heavy drinking, driving under alcohol influence, alcohol-related interpersonal problems, use after interpersonal problems, alcohol-related risky behaviors, and alcohol-related legal problems.
Methods
We analyzed data from U.S. individuals aged 12 to 25 years who participated in annual, cross-sectional U.S. National Surveys on Drug Use and Health from 2002 to 2014. Logistic regression models were used to examine the association of cannabis use with six alcohol-associated adverse effects variables. Frequency of cannabis use served as the primary independent variable, and were divided into four categories: frequent use (21–30 days per month), less frequent use (1–20 days per month), no use over the past 12 months, and no lifetime cannabis use. Alcohol dependence and six alcohol-associated adverse effects variables served as our primary outcomes.
Results
The study included 465,090 respondents aged 12 to 25 years, among all past-year cannabis users, (47.5%) were less frequent (1–20 days/month) users. Less frequent cannabis use was highest among male, 15–25-year-olds, and non-Hispanic white 11.8, 84 and 10.6%, respectively. In adjusted models, past-year less frequent cannabis use (1–20 days/month) was significantly associated with past-year alcohol dependence (adjusted odds ratio aOR 5.57, 95% confidence interval (CI) 5.5–6.4); heavy drinking in the past-year (aOR 3.41, 95% CI 3.2–3.5); alcohol-related interpersonal problems in the past-year (aOR 7.33, 95% CI 7.0–7.5); use after interpersonal problems (aOR 5.17, 95% CI 4.8–5.5); alcohol-related risky behaviors (aOR 7.29, 95% CI 7.0–7.5), and, driving under influence of alcohol (aOR 7.19, 95% CI 6.9–7.4). No cannabis use past-year were more likely to report alcohol dependence (aOR 2.81, 95% CI 2.6–3) compared with no lifetime cannabis use.
Conclusion
These findings indicated that within the general population, not only frequent cannabis user (21–30 days per month) but even less frequent cannabis use (1–20 days/month) was significantly associated with past-year alcohol dependence and alcohol-associated adverse effects than no lifetime cannabis use. These adverse alcohol-related outcomes associated with less frequent cannabis use, should be taken under careful consideration in alcohol use disorder treatment setting and policy planning.
