JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The consumption and cultivation of cannabis for medical purposes has been recently authorized in Thailand. Although the number of cannabis users appears to have increased in the past five years, little is known about how Thais perceive cannabis and what are the cannabis products available in Thailand.

Objective:

This research aimed to explore Twitter chatter to provide new insights regarding the content of cannabis-related tweets with a particular emphasis on attitudes, health-related benefits and harms that Thais linked to cannabis as well as the type of cannabis products advertised on Twitter.

Methods:

Cannabis-related tweets in the Thai Language were collected between January 01, 2022 and April 30, 2022, using tweepy Python library to query the Twitter API. Tweets were manually coded to evaluate the attitude, health-effects and type of products advertised in a sample of 20,000 cannabis-related tweets through a qualitative content analysis achieved by four Thai native speaker coders. Tweets coded as positive and negative as well as tweets advertising cannabis or cannabis products were further analyzed through open coding.

Results:

441,155 tweets were collected based on 83 search terms. 72.6% of collected tweets from the 20,000 random sample were coded as relevant to the study. 54.6% of relevant tweets were advertising cannabis products, 29.8% were personal communications, and 15.6% were related to news or media content. Among the tweets coded as personal communications, 79.1% were coded as neutral, 14.3% as positive, and 6.6% as negative. Only 3.2% of the negative tweets expressed a negative or harmful experience against 13.5% of positive tweets. Among tweets coded as advertising cannabis or cannabis products for sale, 94.4% advertised cannabis flower, 2.4% and 1.8% were advertising cannabis edibles and concentrates respectively.

Conclusions:

Although the majority of personal communication tweets were coded as neutral, tweets coded as positive are more likely to contain depictions of positive effects linked to cannabis products usage. Our analysis also reveals that a large portion of cannabis-related tweets in Thai language are advertising cannabis products for sale. Among these tweets, potent hybrid strains, cannabis concentrates and cannabis edibles with high THC content were advertised. Consumption of this type of cannabis products increase the risk of harmful side-effects, especially in a population with limited knowledge about these products that have recently emerged in Thailand. Our findings call for increasing public awareness of the possible adverse consequences linked to these emerging cannabis products and for a constant active monitoring of cannabis usage to detect potential harmful products.