Projects

Based on past work, the MAC lab determined there was a need for accurate and relevant information about cannabis product packaging in an effort to help reduce college student cannabis misuse. We currently are running multiple projects relevant to an intervention we developed to inform college students about relevant laws, cannabis product packaging and marketing, and cannabis misuse. An R34 from the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse is allowing us to further develop the intervention and test its acceptability across college students in three states: Washington, Illinois, and New York. For that project, we are conducting focus groups with campus health practitioners and college students to refine the intervention prior to testing it in a survey across the three states. Additionally, we are running an experiment that allows us to look at the effects of the intervention in the immediate and longer-term with college students to see if the intervention impacts cannabis use and misuse. In previous work, we found promising results for the intervention.

For the last few years, we have been working on furthering the social norms approach for substance misuse prevention. While past social norms work has often targeted campaigns based on gender, we explored opportunities to create campaigns that are effective without such targeting. Results are promising and have led to continued efforts to bolder social norms data and inform future intervention efforts. We are currently collecting both qualitative and quantitative data to further campaign efforts.