Currently accepted at: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Dec 18, 2025
Date Accepted: Mar 31, 2026
This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.
It will appear shortly on 10.2196/89897
The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Surveillance of Cannabis Strains using online reviews – A trend analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
The flower strains of cannabis are an important attribute that determines product appeals and demand. However, there is a lack of surveillance of cannabis strains as the marketplace expands in response to the growing legalization of recreational and medical cannabis.
Objective:
This study aimed to surveil cannabis strains using numbers of reviews and review history scraped from Leafly.com , further analyzing review growth trends by strains.
Methods:
Using the time stamps of each review, we constructed a dataset of the number of reviews by strains and years over the period of 2010–2023. We further conducted trend analyses using Joinpoint regressions.
Results:
As of December 2023, over 7,000 cannabis strains are available for view or purchase on the website, including over 6,000 that have been reviewed by users or customers.. The number of strains experienced a 13-fold increase from 280 strains in 2010 to 3,905 strains in 2023. Strains that are hybrid and contain over 15% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels and 0 or 1% Cannabidiol (CBD)/cannabigerol (CBG) experienced the highest growth in review numbers.
Conclusions:
The rapid growth of strain type poses challenges to regulations. Policymakers who would like to base regulation over product features need to consider the strain variability along with other changes in features such as THC/CBD/CBG levels and forms.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.