Student perceptions of cannabis use

Figures & data

Table 1. Demographic information.

	Number of participants
Home province
New Brunswick	6
Nova Scotia	7
Ontario	5
Western Canada	2
Year of study
1st	5
2nd	4
3rd	6
4th	5
Age
19	4
20	5
21	2
22	2
23	3
24+	4

Table 2. Information on cannabis use.

Use		Number of participants
School level at first use
Grade 10–12	4
High School	13
University	3
Current use (frequency)
Daily	8
1–5x a week	6
1–3x a month	5
Not currently using	1
Current methods of use
Smoking	18
Concentrates	4
Vaporizer	5
Edibles and oils	5

Table 3. Reported positive mental and physical health effects of cannabis use.

Effect	Participant	Quote
Cannabis for treating physical complaints	Ashley	I don’t know if only because you’re stoned, but I feel like when I do smoke weed my vision does become better. For those 3 hours, it becomes much more clear.
	Lisa	I have really bad headaches, so it’s like sometimes if I’m up and I can’t sleep for the life of me, my head is just pounding I will [use cannabis] to go to sleep.
	Ed	Getting a good night’s sleep really affects how my back pain is the next day, so I think that’s the biggest improvement when it comes to the pain relief.
	Terrance	I mean my lung capacity is better than before I used it,
Cannabis as beneficial for mental health	John	Well, my mental illness is bipolar, and I get really bad depressions, and when I get overwhelmed that’s when it really magnifies. And I find if I smoke it and I just relax for that night the next day my symptoms feel nowhere near as bad and I kind of get better.
	Emily	I think it can definitely help with like anxiety related things. Like it’s definitely helped me with that and with like sleep.
	Alex	I find that it’s, it almost makes me chemically incapable of being anxious…
	Theo	Sometimes I have trouble sleeping if I’m really stressed or sore, so it usually gives me a really good time to catch up on my sleep, and I’ll wake up feeling refreshed
	George	When you smoke weed, I feel just more relaxed and the energy around everyone is more, how can I say this, well, relaxed and de-stressed.
Safer than prescriptions	Jimmy	It’s either that you’re on this hardcore drug that you take every single day or when you’re having an attack versus, you know, smoking weed once a week. If this does the trick, it’s definitely better than me getting these amounts of chemicals put into my body.
	John	I feel like there is less negative consequences of marijuana compared to prescription drugs.
	Noah	I’ve tried Aleve, Naproxen, turmeric, I’ve had 2 years of pain so I’ve tried a lot of things prior to cannabis being legal. And I’ve almost got stomach ulcers, it hasn’t worked, I’ve tried so many different things, so many different types of therapies, nothing seemed to work. Then I tried smoking weed for a couple times I’m like, ‘Hey, I feel less pain’ so I’m, like, this seems to work.
	Jacob	I have worked with my doctor to sort of work out proper dosage, when to take it, that kind of stuff.
	Ed	I take certain amounts every day depending on my pain level. Usually about 10 mg of THC a day. With varying amounts of CBD depending on what oils I order, but most days I’ll take that early on in the day and then maybe an hour or two later I’ll start noticing an effect.

Table 4. Reported mental and physical risks of cannabis use.

Effect	Participant	Quote
Physical	Jacob	It’s just bad for your lungs and you can smell it and you can feel the effects, and coughing up ash and stuff like that, it’s not good.
	Josh	… the amount of brown stuff and tar and I don’t need to be putting that in my body.
Distancing from risk (physical health)	Jimmy	Physically, smoking one joint a week is probably not that bad. Seeing how people smoke a pack a day of cigarettes and live till they’re 80.
	Charlie	I guess part of me is thinking that, you know, I would have noticed something by now. If something was going to happen
Psychosis and mental health	Ellen	I remember having like heard that you were at a greater risk for developing schizophrenia or for schizophrenia to be activated if you’re smoking at that age.
	Terrence	I know that some studies have shown an association with psychosis, like schizophrenia. Especially in young users.
	Josh	I do remember being a bit concerned about, yeah, definitely schizophrenia and the mental health aspect.
	Antonio	(Regarding frequency of use) It’s again only, you know, very occasional because I do know about the health risks kind of more.
	Jacob	I wish I had never started, because obviously it does affect brain development.
Distancing from risk (mental health)	Ellen	I was aware of that and I think it made me nervous for a little while and I probably cut back on how much weed I was smoking at that point but it was never really at the front of my mind.
	Charlie	I was aware that it could be catalyst for schizophrenia, but I don’t know. I wasn’t really too concerned about health risks that were associated with it.

Table 5. Academic considerations of cannabis use.

Consideration	Participant	Quote
Motivation	Ron	Well I’ve had days where I just get high first thing in the morning and don’t touch my schoolwork and let it pile up and I just keep smoking the entire day.
	Josh	I don’t like smoking during the day. It definitely takes your motivation away I’d say, to, like, want to do things.
	Hailey	First semester it took me out for like 2 days. If I got very high, I would be out for a long time and I wouldn’t be able to do any work, you’d just sleep all day.
Focus	George	things just might not grab your attention as [they] might should
	Antonio	You can’t depend on it to develop a real, you know, structured understanding or anything
	Jacob	When it comes to more technical aspects, like math… absolutely not. Because it makes it worse, it makes it harder… It’s like trying to do gymnastics when you’re drunk.
		I don’t know if other people have said this, but, to me, it keeps me focused; it keeps me focused on the task at hand…
Quality of work	John	If I tried to do schoolwork, I know that it would just not be good compared to me being sober, like the quality of my work.
	Ellen	I feel like the thing that I make after I’ve smoked weed is never, in retrospect, is never as good as I kind of thought it was while doing it, so I don’t see that as a benefit for me personally.
	Felicity	I try to express my thoughts, I’m like wow this is perfect this makes so much sense and [the professor] reads my essay that I wrote high and they’re like’ ‘like you have the ideas here, but yeah.
	Antonio	High ideas aren’t always the best ideas.
Creativity and insight	Felicity	(It) helped me a lot and uh, influencing my thought process and helping me to think differently to be more creative
	Terrance	…if I’m going to read, it might help to have a little bit of cannabis in me. Just like I said, when you watch a movie or have a discussion with somebody, it does open you up a little bit to some new ideas.
	Josh	It makes things more interesting. Like I’ll be reading a book about something I couldn’t care very much about but if I smoke and then do it, it at least makes it a little more tolerable to do certain tasks.
	John	I grew up pretty low-class working person, working my whole life really hard jobs… and when I smoked weed with my buddy, we always discussed astronomy was the first academic field, and we used to love talking about that and metaphysics and yeah. So, I would go as far to say that marijuana might have introduced me to the world of academia.
Academic stress	Jimmy	…relaxing is super important, and I typically forget to relax, and so this forces me to do that so I can’t see how that’s a bad thing for my academics
	Ellen	It’s like I have been working really hard for a while, and I really feel like I need to relax and take a night off.
	Emily	When my mental health is improved, I’m a better student. So, you know, if I’m sleeping better and feeling less stressed then I can perform better.
	Josh	Say I was stressed out about a test or something. Before I’d go to bed I’d smoke and wouldn’t worry all night.
Managing use	George	I wouldn’t smoke during the day because I used to do my stuff during the day, so smoking at night more like a reward to relax and just enjoy your own alone time if you want.
	Lisa	I would never smoke during the day, because, like, I just could never focus like that, that’s just not for me. Yeah, I’ve never smoked instead of studying or instead of going to class.
	Noah	Yeah, in my leisure time that’s when I ever do it. Often Friday afternoons. Because we call them fried-days.
	Ed	Without any pain relief it is useless for me to go to class because I can’t sit still; I can’t focus at all… I’m not able to do it. So there’s some tradeoff, which is I’d rather have, you know, slightly lower mental ability than you know a full inability

Table 6. Social effects of cannabis use.

Social effect	Participant	Quote
Facilitating social engagement	Ron	Yeah it’s just nice. Everyone is in the same head and you can have a bit of a different kind of fun.
	Jimmy	Otherwise I wouldn’t socialize as much. It kind of just puts me in a situation where I socialize.
	Ashley	I just like to have something that we can all share at a BBQ or a family get together or whatever.
	John	Some of the best times of my life has been sitting around on beanie bag chairs; the whole typical stoner atmosphere.
	Charlie	I’m trying to think how often any of us invite someone over for reasons other than to drink or smoke
	Antonio	I think it’s [a] pretty small aspect of the social life.
	Ron	Cool people smoke pot. You know, it was ridiculous how it connected the friends you had and the drugs you did were.
	George	Well since day one I came here, first thing I made my buddies was by smoking a joint all together, so that was the first social thing that we did together you know. And instead of going to orientation, which the whole house does, we were doing something separate. All the common interest was consuming cannabis.
	Josh	You hang out with people more just because they’re nice people or based on like, the content of their character, not just because they like to use cannabis.
	Ellen	The atmosphere has kind of been one of like ‘oh would you like any? If not, that’s fine.’ And then everybody kind of makes their own choice of whether or not to smoke it.
	Jimmy	But that’s not like a prerequisite for friendship, but it’s a primer for friendship.
Cannabis as safer than alcohol	Terrance	You know, it’s not a party. We’re not hooting and hollering and falling into each other. It’s, yeah, it’s just a way to get some discussion going and maybe listen to some music.
	Jacob	Most of the people that have some sort of you know, they don’t show up to class or they have trouble with school, um, it’s alcohol, 100% alcohol that contributes to that. Sure, they smoke cannabis as well, but no it’s the party culture surrounding alcohol that’s contributing to that kind of stuff for sure
Stigma and social risks	Ashley	Marijuana still has this stigma around it where, like, if you smoke, you’re a drug addict.
	Emily	There’s, like, there is a bit of stigma with it, like, some people are very against it even though it’s legal now.
	Felicity	I don’t like that people associate stoners with idiots.
	Alex	I think that some people, because they do want to be part of the social group, that they will do things that they’re not necessarily comfortable with.
	Charlie	It’s kind of like the rest of my peers are going to do it; I kind of don’t want to be missing out.
	Hailey	I don’t want to go out and smoke with everybody but then everybody else is gone out smoking and I’m here by myself in my room.
	Felicity	It’s kind of like so you have the drug and you’re already isolated and the drug makes you isolate yourself more unless you’re with your other stoner friends who are also isolated.
	Jacob	The way I got into opioids was through smoking cannabis…It was the people. Right? So, the guy who was selling me cannabis had moxies, and that’s where I got introduced into that kind of stuff.
	Felicity	We bonded over weed…and then you know that’s not enough, so then Xanax comes in and yeah.

Table 7. Effects of legalization.

Effect	Participant	Quote
Participants’ use	Noah	(Regarding use pre-legalization) Like, very rarely would I, because of that, because I didn’t want any repercussions.
	Ashley	(Regarding changes in personal use post-legalization) It didn’t change
	George	(Regarding changes in personal use post-legalization) Me personally? Not really.
	Theo	For me, it hasn’t really made much of a difference.
	Alex	I think it’s business as usual really… building up to legalization, people still treated it the same, at least people who were already using it.
Privilege	Ellen	I’m just like a cute young white woman. I can’t really see, the police aren’t out to get me, you know what I mean?
	Felicity	Weed has always been legalized to me… I’m very privileged, I could afford, you know, walking downtown Toronto smoking a joint, no one would stop me.
Influence on other’s use	Lisa	This is what I would infer, is that more people are smoking like I said, more people are experimenting.
	Jimmy	Now it’s legal too, a lot, like, one of my friends that never smoked weed before smokes with me…
	Noah	I think just more people are using it, but also more people are informed about it… It’s definitely de-stigmatized marijuana
	Sandra	…I’m a lot more comfortable with it now, and definitely with students it’s become like a more comfortable topic
	Terrance	I found so many people in my life that I had no idea touched cannabis have now come out and said yeah I’ve been using it for 10 years.
Perceptions of the legal market	Hailey	I’ve never bought anything from there just because it’s more expensive.
	Ashley	I mean I go to my friend and I can get it for a 100, you’re selling it for 200? I’m not going to buy it from [provincial retailer].
	Ron	I don’t think I know anyone that goes to the store regularly, and if they do, I think they’re getting ripped off.
	Ashley	We are 6 months in now, and every time I go, you are out of this and you’re out of this and you’re out of this.
	Alex	I think that there’s still people around here who will rely on the people that they used to buy from, simply because they don’t like the product that [retailer] offers.
	Charlie	(Regarding reasons for purchasing from the provincial retailer) I don’t know, partially convenience I guess.
	Lisa	(Regarding reasons for purchasing from the provincial retailer) …I have a lot of control…there’s so many risks involved with, like, cutting and lacing and that kind of thing.
	Emily	(Regarding reasons for purchasing from the provincial retailer … they say it’s one thing, but you really have no idea…