The Medical Marijuana Industry and the Use of "Research as Marketing"

Marijuana and marijuana-based medical products are now legally sold in 33 US states and most European Union countries. Widespread medical marijuana legalization has ushered in an unprecedented level of investment in marijuana, replacing small, independently owned storefronts with polished national and international corporations. As the industry has become more sophisticated, so has its marketing; a recent commentary I coauthored in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveys Big Marijuana's marketing strategy and summarizes how Big Marijuana companies convey poorly substantiated health claims to potential consumers. This editorial is intended to highlight one particularly pernicious marketing technique commonly employed by Big Marijuana companies-a technique I call "research as marketing." Essentially, marketers realize that social media sites and the 24-hour news cycle effectively deliver health information to consumers and that consumers are less-discerning auditors of scientific rigor than are federal regulators. Therefore, rather than invest in the multitude of expensive, large-scale clinical trials required to make regulator-endorsed health claims, marijuana companies sponsor and publicize the results of less-robust studies. Using weak research in their marketing, marijuana companies may mislead consumers into conflating, for example, the value of evidence from a series of highly rigorous Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prescription drug trials with that from a correlational or ecological study. For example, in a post with the headline "The Role of Medical Cannabis in Managing Symptoms of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder]," multibillion dollar marijuana company Aphria cites a 25-participant imaging study to state "cannabinoid research suggests a link between endocannabinoid deficiencies and maladaptive brain changes after trauma exposures." Through authoritative-looking citations and biomedical jargon, consumers can be misled into believing that these relationships between marijuana use and health benefits are established scientific fact rather than budding theories. In addition to threatening the safety and autonomy of medical consumers, research as marketing has the potential to diminish the value of rigorous scientific research and undermine consumers' faith in medical sciences.