TY - JOUR
T1 - Explaining the Impact of Legal Access to Cannabis on Attitudes toward Users
AU - Queirolo, Rosario
AU - Repetto, Lorena
AU - Sotto, Belén
AU - Álvarez, Eliana
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Laws and public policies can change social norms by signaling which behaviors are legal or illegal. Recent cannabis legalization policies might have this effect. Does cannabis legalization increase social acceptance toward its users? This article focuses on understanding the impact of Uruguayan cannabis legalization on attitudes toward cannabis users by taking advantage of having legal and illegal mechanisms for getting cannabis under the same national context. To do so, we conducted a conjoint experiment in a national face-to-face survey (N = 2,181). Participants were presented with two different profiles of potential neighbors and asked to choose one. These profiles randomized attributes such as being a registered user, mechanism of cannabis acquisition, frequency of cannabis use, as well as sociodemographic characteristics. Participants rated each profile from 1 to 7 based on how much they would like to have them as neighbors. Subsequently, we estimated the average marginal component effect as the critical causal quantity of interest. Results reveal that users who access cannabis through a legal mechanism are more preferred as neighbors than those who do not. Thus, the evidence presented in this article indicates that regulation, by proving legal access, increases the social acceptance of cannabis users.
AB - Laws and public policies can change social norms by signaling which behaviors are legal or illegal. Recent cannabis legalization policies might have this effect. Does cannabis legalization increase social acceptance toward its users? This article focuses on understanding the impact of Uruguayan cannabis legalization on attitudes toward cannabis users by taking advantage of having legal and illegal mechanisms for getting cannabis under the same national context. To do so, we conducted a conjoint experiment in a national face-to-face survey (N = 2,181). Participants were presented with two different profiles of potential neighbors and asked to choose one. These profiles randomized attributes such as being a registered user, mechanism of cannabis acquisition, frequency of cannabis use, as well as sociodemographic characteristics. Participants rated each profile from 1 to 7 based on how much they would like to have them as neighbors. Subsequently, we estimated the average marginal component effect as the critical causal quantity of interest. Results reveal that users who access cannabis through a legal mechanism are more preferred as neighbors than those who do not. Thus, the evidence presented in this article indicates that regulation, by proving legal access, increases the social acceptance of cannabis users.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85161624314&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/ijpor/edad010
DO - 10.1093/ijpor/edad010
M3 - Artículo
AN - SCOPUS:85161624314
SN - 0954-2892
VL - 35
JO - International Journal of Public Opinion Research
JF - International Journal of Public Opinion Research
IS - 2
M1 - edad010
ER -