Researchers Find Twitter Has Reefer Madness

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have recently conducted a detailed analysis of attitudes towards weed on Twitter. Their findings: Twitter loves the ganj.

Researchers analyzed all cannabis related posts in a 1 month period in 2014, finding 7 million tweets in reference to weed with far more pro-weed tweets than anti-weed tweets. They found about 15 times as many cannabis friendly tweets as those displaying anti-weed messages. Keywords used by researchers in the study include: weed, blunt, joint, stoner, kush, marijuana, stoned, pot, bong, cannabis, joint, ganja, pothead, sativa, indica, and mmot.

To gauge whether the tweets were weed friendly or not, researchers took a random sample of 7000 influential tweets (with both a high number of followers and a high Klout Score). Among the analyzed tweets, 77 percent were pro-weed, 18 percent were neutral, and a mere 5 percent were against cannabis. From this analysis researchers found that a cannabis related tweet was 15 times as likely to be positive than negative.

Researchers categorized the positive tweets and anti-weed tweets into general categories or themes. For the pro-weed tweets, the most commonly found category was statements indicating tweeters wanted weed or planned on smoking weed — not too surprising. Other categories included remarks on heavy cannabis use, legalization, and weed and relationships.

Among the anti-weed post categories were tweeters saying cannabis smokers are unproductive losers and comments saying that smoking weed is unattractive and/or gross. Well that’s just not very nice at all. Other anti-weed tweets came from former or current users talking about what they see as the harmful effects of the drug or expressing a desire to quit weed.

The researchers were concerned about the finding that most of the Twitter users tweeting about weed were relatively young.

“The concern that we have about pro-marijuana Twitter chatter is the potential for social contagion and increased marijuana use in adolescents,” researchers wrote. Adolescents are a demographic at risk for developing cannabis dependency and other related problems.

“It’s a concern because frequent marijuana use can affect brain structures and interfere with cognitive function, emotional development and academic performance,” said study author Patricia A. Cavazos-Rehg PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and scholar in the Washington University Institute for Public Health. “The younger people are when they begin using marijuana, the more likely they are to become dependent. A lot of young people will phase out of marijuana use as they get older, but unfortunately, we’re not good at predicting who those individuals are.”

It should be noted however that the vast majority of Twitter users are adolescents and that among the general population, Twitter users are a minority and not representative of society as a whole. Researchers concede that they “cannot verify the degree to which tweets correspond with marijuana use.”

In fact, recent data suggests that cannabis use among youth is not increasing significantly since cannabis was first legalized in Colorado. That is to say, Twitter probably isn’t going to cause an epidemic of weed crazed youth.