Puff Puff Pass-Ing Covid? Why Sharing Weed Decreased During The Covid-19 Pandemic - Forbes | By The Perfect Enemy

Has the Covid-19 pandemic made “Puff, Puff, Pass” a thing of the past? Not exactly, but according to new research the pandemic did decrease the practice of sharing inhaled recreational cannabis between multiple people.

Passing a joint, pipe or vaporizer of cannabis around a circle is a common practice in the cannabis community. And “Puff, puff, pass,” an informal rule suggesting each person take two puffs of the cannabis being inhaled before passing it to the next person, has been a principle of cannabis etiquette for a long time. It even made it into Higher Etiquette, the guide to cannabis manners by etiquette expert Lizzie Post. Not sharing in this way can sometimes be seen as an insult amongst cannabis users, even if there are strangers in your smoking circle.

While this principle is based on laudable values like generosity and equity, medical experts have repeatedly warned cannabis users about the risks of passing inhaled forms of cannabis between different users’ mouths. Previous studies have found sharing cannabis in this way risks transmitting serious diseases such as oral HPV and tuberculosis. And during the pandemic, organizations like The World Health Organization warned cannabis users that sharing cannabis in this way could increase the risk of Covid-19 transmission.

Researchers from UCLA’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids and Epidemiology department conducted this latest study to look at whether the practice of puff puff passing decreased during the pandemic, when health risks and messaging about those risks were high. To do this, researchers analyzed survey data from 925 non-medical cannabis users, who reported using inhaled methods. They looked at cannabis related behaviors before and after the pandemic to compare whether things had changed. The results showed a significant shift away from cannabis sharing behaviors – although the majority of cannabis users continued to share some of the time.

The study found that only 12.4% of respondents had completely abstained from sharing cannabis before the pandemic. This rose to 24.9% during the height of the pandemic. While the percentage of cannabis users avoiding cannabis sharing more than doubled, the number shows that a large majority continued to share cannabis. Still, only 11.2% reported sharing most of the time (down from 19.5% before the pandemic), and only 3.1% reported always sharing (compared to 5.2% before the pandemic). These results suggest that many cannabis users may have been using their own judgment on who was safe to share with, and abstained from sharing in other contexts. Still, the overall trend was a shift away from puff puff passing.

Researchers on this study concluded that cannabis users did seem to shift behaviors during the pandemic, perhaps in response to the messaging around the risks of puff puff passing. They shared that “harm reduction messaging around sharing of cannabis during surges of COVID-19 or other respiratory infections may provide benefit in reducing infection among those who use cannabis, especially as cannabis use in the USA continues to increase.”

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Published on The Perfect Enemy at https://bit.ly/3J16DyX.