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Brain Morphology of Cannabis Users With or Without Psychosis: A Pilot MRI Study
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Geographic Differences in Cannabis Conversations on Twitter: Infodemiology Study
Jenna van Draanen1, HaoDong Tao2, Saksham Gupta3
1Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
|October 5, 2020
Summary
Sentiment analysis of cannabis legalization tweets reveals more negative discussions in restrictive US states and Canada. Public health messaging should address safe cannabis use, especially where recreational use is legal.
Area of Science:
- Infodemiology and public health surveillance
- Computational social science
- Cannabis policy research
Background:
- Infodemiology leverages social media to track public health trends.
- Twitter data offers real-time insights into substance use patterns.
- Recent cannabis legalization in North America necessitates research into public sentiment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare sentiment and content of cannabis tweets across US states with varying cannabis laws.
- To analyze sentiment differences in cannabis discussions between the US and Canada from 2017-2019.
Main Methods:
- Collected over 1.2 million cannabis-related tweets (Jan 2017-June 2019).
- Geographically grouped tweets based on state/national cannabis legal status.
- Utilized VADER for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling.
Main Results:
- Significant sentiment differences observed between US states with varying cannabis laws (P=.001).
- US and Canada showed significant differences in tweet sentiment (P=.003 for positive, P=.001 for negative).
- Restrictive cannabis policies correlated with more negative online sentiment.
Conclusions:
- Understanding online cannabis discourse and geographic variations can inform public health strategies.
- Targeted public health education on safe cannabis consumption is crucial, particularly in regions with legal recreational and medical use.
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