Development of a Canadian Youth Cannabis Survey: Understanding changing aspects of cannabis use among young Canadians

Legislation has been introduced to legalize and regulate recreational use of cannabis, with implementation in July 2018. An important concern is protecting young people from potential harms of cannabis use. Cannabis use by Canadian youth is among the highest in the world, although recent trends have been downwards. It is critical to monitor how these patterns change after legalization. These effects of legalization might also differ between provinces, which will be able to set different ages for legal purchase and different rules for retail sales and distribution. This project will contribute to understanding the impact of legalization on cannabis use by youth. First, we will use existing survey data to identify recent trends in cannabis use by age and sex/gender, for each province and for subgroups of youth (official language minorities, youth in low income households, rural and urban youth, recent immigrants). Although we have information about national trends, we do not know how these vary by province, or for these subgroups. This analysis will help us see how patterns of cannabis use by youth change after legalization, as new data become available. Second, we will create a new survey to collect information on cannabis use among youth. National and provincial surveys currently ask whether young people have used cannabis but do not capture other important aspects of use such as whether they obtained cannabis from illegal sources, forms of cannabis used, and the price paid, among others. We will identify aspects that are most important to capture and pilot test questions with focus groups of youth to produce a survey questionnaire to be used in future data collections. This work will be conducted by the team that collects the Canadian Student Tobacco Alcohol and Drugs Survey, a national survey of youth conducted for Health Canada, and additional experts. Health Canada and the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addictions are Knowledge Users for the project