Highs and downs: A scoping review of public opinion about cannabis, alcohol and tobacco in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ISSUES: Since the legalisation of cannabis in October 2018, Canada has emerged as a privileged place for research on the properties of this substance, its health effects, but also on its relation with public opinion. However, this scoping review points out the complexity of tracing the evolution of Canadian public opinion on cannabis based on available scientific data. APPROACH: This review follows the guidelines of the Joanna Briggs Institute and summarises more than 60 years of research on Canadians' public opinion, perception and knowledge of cannabis. The study also includes alcohol and tobacco in order to provide a meaningful comparison between substances. KEY FINDINGS: One hundred and sixty-one references selected from over 30 000 studies, with the oldest dating back to 1956, show that public opinion on cannabis is under-studied in Canada compared to alcohol and tobacco. Young people and students are among the most studied populations, unlike Aboriginal communities, immigrants and elderly people. The study reveals the absence of experts in public opinion and political communication, and calls for an imperative need for theoretical frameworks rooted in the work of social scientists. IMPLICATION: These findings do not suggest slowing the rate of publication on alcohol, tobacco, youth or students. Rather, they encourage increasing the rate of publication on other substances used and on other groups also targeted as being particularly at risk of misuse. CONCLUSION: New studies need to measure and contribute to the understanding of Canadian public opinion on cannabis in comparison with public policies currently in place.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".