Marijuana Retailers are Targeting Minors on Social Media

A new study reports that some recreational marijuana shops are using tricks that come from old playbooks of alcohol and tobacco companies in order to target underage users on social media.

While some states have established regulations on marijuana marketers, researchers have seen marijuana retailers posting on social media to promote their products with posts that they wrote that included:

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Cartoon characters such as Snoopy, spongebob, squarepants, and Rick and Morty.
Present store-branded merchandise, such as caps and t-shirts.
A special discount and deal for Memorial Day or a regular Friday special.

"Those types of restricted content basically come from evidence around ways that tobacco and alcohol companies used to appeal to youth," said lead author Dr. Megan Moreno is the division chief for general pediatrics and adolescents at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"For example, discounts and promotions are actually ways to draw in youths to use your products because they're very price-sensitive, and branded content is a way to draw in young people because they want the hats and the T-shirts," she said.

On one of her projects, Moreno and her colleagues decided to study how pot shops were using social media to promote their goods, and they focused on four states that were early adopters of legalizing marijuana: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska.

"The one remaining Wild West of marketing is still social media, and one of the issues with social media is that these platforms are most highly frequented by youth," Moreno said. "Essentially, we were wondering what's happening in a lightly regulated environment that's populated by youth, and how are cannabis companies leveraging that."

As part of their research, researchers evaluated 1 year of posts on Facebook and Instagram that were publicly displayed by companies located in the four states.

On the positive side, the researchers noted that only 16 of the 80 recreational marijuana retailers identified by the researchers had an online presence on both social media sites. And two of those companies deleted their pages during the study period. In the end, researchers ended up with 2,660 posts from 14 businesses.

About 35% of the posts featured discounts and promotions, even if such marketing is strictly prohibited. Around 7% of the posts featured pop culture references, 6% featured items that were brand-branded, and 6% appealed to youth through the use of cartoon characters.

12% of the posts on social media stated you should use marijuana products until you are extremely impaired.

"In alcohol advertising, you don't often see ads that say things like, 'Hey, use our products so you can get drunker. Use our product so you can achieve a better buzz,'" Moreno said. "That's absolutely not allowable in alcohol literature, but we see a lot of that content in the cannabis literature, saying things like 'Use our product to get higher, use our product to reach that higher place we know you want to go' — really pushing people toward the idea that you should use until you feel impaired."

Linda Richter, vice president of prevention research and analysis with the Partnership to End Addiction, noted that this is all happening in states with "some of the most robust youth protection provisions in their recreational, or adult use, marijuana laws."

Because of that, she said, "the findings are likely quite conservative regarding the extent to which cannabis businesses stray from state marketing restrictions and requirements, such that the actual state of affairs is probably worse and more damaging to teens than reflected in this study."