US MED Teen Drug Use In more than a decade since Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana for adults, state officials have come up with a ton of ideas for delivering cannabis-cautious public health messages to the public.
They tried stoner humor. They tried high-concept art installations. They tried … hoedown music?
The results have been decidedly mixed.
But now state-funded researchers have launched a new campaign, backed by what they hope will be two secret ingredients: mountains of science and hours spent around the state listening.
The campaign is called The Tea on THC, and its roots stretch back to 2021, when the Colorado Legislature tasked the Colorado School of Public Health with studying the effects of high-potency cannabis. The first phase of that process — a lengthy review of hundreds of studies on the subject — produced a 2023 report that summarized the findings to that point. A complex data dashboard continues to add new studies to the analysis.
The Tea on THC represents the second phase of this research project: Turning the data into effective public health messages. The campaign especially focuses on messages that caution about potential negative mental health consequences from using high-THC marijuana.
“This campaign lays out what we know and what we don’t to help the public make the best-informed decisions possible,” Dr. Jonathan Samet, the former dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who worked on the project, said this month during a campaign kickoff event. “Importantly, it encourages people to talk to each other openly and respectfully about cannabis use.”
SCIENCE AND POT
Samet’s acknowledgment of the unknowns is appropriate because there is still much to be learned.It’s been barely a decade since Colorado’s first recreational pot shops opened — the first in the country. Since then, the cannabis industry both locally and nationally has undergone rapid transformation, developing and introducing both higher-potency marijuana buds but also concentrates and edible products that, combined, now make up nearly half of the market.This kind of accelerated evolution makes it difficult for careful, time-consuming science to catch up — especially because the federal prohibition of marijuana meant that, until recently, a […]
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