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. 2018 Jul 2;13(1):23.
doi: 10.1186/s13011-018-0152-7.

Marijuana promotions on social media: adolescents' views on prevention strategies

Megan A Moreno  1 , Aubrey D Gower  2 , Marina C Jenkins  2 , Bradley Kerr  2 , Jesse Gritton  3
Affiliations

Marijuana promotions on social media: adolescents' views on prevention strategies

Megan A Moreno et al. Subst Abuse Treat Prev Policy. .

Abstract

Background: Youth exposure to positive marijuana messages increases their risk of marijuana use. Since Washington State legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, marijuana businesses have used social media business pages to promote their products. Regulations to prevent youth access and targeting by marijuana businesses on social media in Washington State are absent. The purpose of this study was to engage youth in conceptualizing prevention approaches to limit youth exposure to marijuana business promotions on social media.

Methods: Towards our goal of generating novel prevention approaches and promoting youth interaction to build ideas, we used focus groups. Adolescents ages 15-20 years in Washington State were recruited through purposeful sampling to achieve a diverse sample from six schools across two counties. During focus groups, trained facilitators used a semi-structured guide to prompt discussion about marijuana business presence on social media. In the latter half of focus groups, facilitators showed example social media posts from marijuana businesses. All focus groups were audio recorded and manually transcribed. Qualitative analysis was conducted using the constant comparative method.

Results: A total of 32 adolescents with average age 17 years (SD = 0.6), 71% female, 43.8% Asian and 21.9% mixed race, participated in 5 focus groups. Recommendations for prevention focused in two main thematic areas. First, participants supported policies to restrict underage access to marijuana social media pages, an example quote was: "you have access to [the social media page] without being 21 and I think that's a problem." Second, participants proposed regulation of content that marijuana companies can post on social media, an example quote was: "I'm thinking they shouldn't be allowed to use children or anything associated with children and the memes that they post."

Conclusions: Our findings indicate two strategies to limit youth exposure to marijuana content on social media. These specific strategies represent potential avenues to revise state policies and test the effectiveness of these approaches for states that permit recreational marijuana.

Keywords: Adolescent; Marijuana; Policy; Prevention; Qualitative; Social media; Youth.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study was approved by the Seattle Children’s Research Institute IRB. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Consent for publication

All participants over age 18 provided consent, as did parents of participants under age 18; all adolescents under age 18 provided assent.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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