Youth lead the way on lower-risk cannabis guidelines

Generating guidelines

With funding from Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) and the Mental Health Commission of Canada, Benoit and her co-researchers launched the first phase of the LRCUG project in 2021. They did a scan of the literature around the impacts of youth cannabis use, assessed what lower risk substance use guidelines were available then, and did a national survey of youth aged 16 to 24 who had used cannabis.

“We asked them a lot about their background, their own use, about what guidelines should be developed for young people, and so on,” says Benoit. “We had quite a rich body of data from different sources.”

But developing the LRCUG didn’t just involve survey data and literature reviews. Input from a youth working group was critical to the project’s success right from the start. Members of the initial group, who worked on the draft guidelines and report that were released in 2023, were connected with the project through the Victoria Youth Clinic Society—now Foundry Victoria. As the project evolved, so too did the youth network, who have always had a central role at the leadership table.

“The youth we work with are our partners and our colleagues,” says Andrea Mellor, a CISUR scientist and co-director for the project. “They’re not research subjects, nor do I think they feel that way either.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by the youth who have been working on the project. “Even though I had joined the project midway, it seems like at every stage of the project, they’re continually trying to engage young people,” says Anurada Amarasekera, a project associate who joined the provincial youth working group during the second project phase in 2024.  “It seems like it’s not just one and done.”

Guided by youth voices

When the team got funding from a Health Research BC Reach grant to pull the cannabis guidelines from the lengthier report and make them even more youth-friendly, they convened a second youth working group—this time drawing from the larger Foundry BC network.

For Sam Flowers, a project associate who joined the youth working group as part of this “knowledge sharing” phase, the project came at an interesting time in their journey with cannabis.

“I came into it wanting to improve my relationship with cannabis use... slowly going through the guidelines and giving myself a bit of time to work with them on my own cannabis use has been helpful,” they said. “That was cool, to actually be able to use these guidelines in my life and test them out. So, the zine has already been a really helpful and affirmative resource for me.”

Over the past year, the working group met regularly to tweak the guidelines with more affirmative wording and to create new ways to present them. While the original six guidelines from the first phase were kept, the youth made some changes to the language.

“Not using the word ‘you,’ and instead talking about ‘we’ or ‘those of us,’” helps reduce stigma and highlights that the content is put together by peers, says Amarasekera. “We are people who have used these strategies and put this information together because we use cannabis and this is what reduced the risk for us.”

In addition to adjusting the language, the youth worked with a user experience designer to create a zine and two posters, which they wanted to be simple, warm and welcoming, and include quotes to help people connect to the content.

“I feel like it would make a world of a difference when I was younger if I had a little book of graphic designs filled with voices of youth who have been in my shoes. I would have made healthier decisions, and I feel like that would be the same for so many other people,” says project associate and youth working group member Dorothy Stirling. “It comes in that little zine booklet; they can just shove it in their bag.”

For the youth working group members, the project was a chance to not only share their knowledge with other young people, but also to connect with each other and learn about what they had in common across their own cannabis experiences.

“My favourite part was how open everybody got, and we would just share certain scary incidences that happened, and also the positive things, and it helped everybody feel less alone,” says youth working group member and project associate Jewel Lavan.

Pilots and partnerships

With the zine and posters ready to go out into the world, and an audio recording of the zine in the works, the LRCUG project has entered a third phase. Funded by a new three-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Development Grant, the latest phase will pilot the zines and posters in community spaces visited by youth—first in Greater Victoria, then across the province—to obtain feedback to further refine them to help shape a Provincial Strategy for Safer Youth Cannabis Use. The first year involves a mapping review on the impact of criminalization of cannabis to the wellbeing of youth globally, a youth workshop and a two-day knowledge symposium with the project partners in early 2026.

Mellor says the symposium will have two parts: co-creating a shared vision for the provincial youth cannabis strategy and working together to plan an environmental assessment. The assessment will pilot the guidelines in different youth-centred spaces in communities across BC to workshop them further and see how they land in different regions, including rural and remote areas.

“The youth working group is going to prepare their own message to the leadership circle about how we need to think about this issue, to say, ‘If there’s going to be a provincial strategy about preventing risk and reducing harms, this is how we think we should move forward,’” she says.

Also at the table for this third phase of the research are several community and academic partners, including the BC Centre for Disease Control, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, Surrounded by Cedar Child and Family Services, the Victoria Youth Empowerment Society, Foundry BC, HEARTH – a high school student-led community group, UBC and SFU.

“I think it’s very cool that Foundry BC is coming so strongly on board. We’re talking 16 clinics with 19 more to come. And now they’re networked across the country,” says Benoit. “We have an opportunity to distribute the guidelines through these Foundries, and tweak tools developed by CISUR provincially and maybe even wider.”

Corinne Tallon, lead of research operations at Foundry BC, says Foundry is happy to follow the youth-led vision for the project.

“This project has such a strong foundation and a strong legacy that we're stepping into as partners. We really just want to honour that and foster that,” she says. “My hope and the excitement for Foundry being a partner is the fact that we are a network of networks - our centres are a collection of partner agencies delivering services, and … they're also so connected in their own communities to partners and other services that they refer out to.”

Ultimately, the LRCUG project’s goal is to create resources and strategies around lower-risk cannabis use that are led by youth and grounded in both empirical research and the day-to-day experiences of young people.

“The youth were the experts, and we honoured that,” says Benoit. “Sometimes in research groups, there are too many experts, and people who don’t have certain credentials don’t get to speak much. I think in this case, the credentials were young people with experience. And I think that has worked all the way through.”

And, critically, the guidelines and strategy need to reach young people where they are at.

“At the centre of this conversation is we want people to be able to read the zine and see some of themselves in it,” says Flowers. “And it not to be so scary. We want people to be less afraid with their drug use. I think it’s important that young people have kind information that helps them make more informed decisions, and space to reflect about the miraculous choices that they’re making in their lives.”

Learn more about the Lower Risk Cannabis Use Guidelines for youth, by youth project.

Amanda Farrell-Low