Understanding the Dynamics between Vaping and Cannabis Legalization Using Twitter Opinions
This addresses a public health problem for policymakers and researchers concerned with vaping-related diseases and adolescent use, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled the unclear role of cannabis legalization in escalating from e-cigarette use to cannabis vaping by estimating its causal effect on pro-cannabis attitudes among e-cigarette users using Twitter data, finding that recreational legalization increases such attitudes in users already favoring e-cigarettes.
Cannabis legalization has been welcomed by many U.S. states but its role in escalation from tobacco e-cigarette use to cannabis vaping is unclear. Meanwhile, cannabis vaping has been associated with new lung diseases and rising adolescent use. To understand the impact of cannabis legalization on escalation, we design an observational study to estimate the causal effect of recreational cannabis legalization on the development of pro-cannabis attitude for e-cigarette users. We collect and analyze Twitter data which contains opinions about cannabis and JUUL, a very popular e-cigarette brand. We use weakly supervised learning for personal tweet filtering and classification for stance detection. We discover that recreational cannabis legalization policy has an effect on increased development of pro-cannabis attitudes for users already in favor of e-cigarettes.