Exploring cannabis consumption stigma in Canada with consideration of age and gender differences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Despite cannabis legalization in Canada, stigma towards cannabis consumers remains evident, particularly toward younger cannabis consumers. Our study examined how stigma towards a young cannabis consumer differed by age and gender. Additionally, we explored the impacts of the participants' cannabis consumption, age, and gender identity on their perceptions of stigma. Methods: = 1,114). Participants were randomly assigned to read one of six vignettes depicting a cannabis consumer that varied by age (14, 21, and 28 years) and gender (man, woman). Participants completed the Social Distance Survey as the dependent measure of stigma. Two factorial ANOVAs were conducted to assess the impacts of the vignette character's age and gender, as well as the participant's age and gender identity, on stigma. Results: = 16.64) displayed more stigmatizing attitudes towards adolescent consumers (14-years-old) compared to 21-years-old or 28-years-old consumers. Additionally, older participants (70 + years) displayed more stigmatizing attitudes than younger participants (18-29 and 30-39 years old). Finally, participants who had not consumed cannabis within the past 6-months displayed more stigmatizing attitudes than those who reported any cannabis use frequency. Conclusions: Stigma remains a concern, particularly toward younger cannabis consumers. These findings highlight the importance of developing targeted, early interventions, and education strategies aimed at reducing stigma, especially among those who hold more stigmatizing attitudes, such as non-cannabis consumers and older individuals, which could help mitigate negative outcomes like decreased help-seeking behavior and social isolation. Impact Statement: Stigma toward cannabis consumers was greatest for younger consumers (14-years-old), followed by 21 and 28-year-olds. Specifically, older generations (70 + year old's) endorsed more stigma compared to younger generations. There were no main effects on stigma toward cannabis consumers based on the vignette character's gender or research participants' gender identity.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".