ArticleJournal of studies on alcohol and drugs2023
Using Online Crowdsourced Data to Measure the Availability of Cannabis Home Delivery: A Pilot Study.
Article in Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploratory analysis of United States-based cannabis product health benefit claims on online marketplaces.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- Cannabis Marketing Strategies in the United States: A Descriptive Analysis of Four Prominent Companies.Substance use & addiction journal · 2025Article
- US State Recreational and Medical Cannabis Delivery Laws, 2024.American journal of public health · 2025Article
- Germany's cannabis act: a catalyst for European drug policy reform?The Lancet regional health. Europe · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveThe growing availability of cannabis products through home delivery services may affect cannabis-related health outcomes. However, research is impeded by a lack of data measuring the scale of home delivery. Prior research demonstrated that crowdsourced websites can be used to validly enumerate brick-and-mortar cannabis outlets. We piloted an extension of this method to explore the feasibility of measuring availability of cannabis home delivery.
methodWe tested implementation of an automated algorithm designed to webscrape data from Weedmaps, the largest crowdsourced website for cannabis retail, to count the number of legal cannabis retailers offering home delivery to the geographic centroid of each Census block group in California. We compared these estimates to the number of brick-and-mortar outlets within each block group. To assess data quality, we conducted follow-up telephone interviews with a subsample of cannabis delivery retailers.
resultsWe successfully implemented the webscraping. Of the 23,212 block groups assessed, 22,542 (97%) were served by at least one cannabis delivery business. Only 461 block groups (2%) contained one or more brick-and-mortar outlets. In interviews, availability varied dynamically as a function of staffing levels, order sizes, time of day, competition, and demand.
conclusionsWebscraping crowdsourced websites could be a viable method for quantifying rapidly evolving availability of cannabis home delivery. However, key practical and conceptual challenges must be overcome to conduct a full-scale validation and develop methodological standards. Acknowledging data limitations, cannabis home delivery appears to be nearly universal in California, whereas availability of brick-and-mortar outlets is limited, underscoring the need for research on home delivery.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.