From vapor self-administering-rodents to personal apps and Zoom smoke sessions, Ryan McLaughlin and Carrie Cuttler have had to get creative to study cannabis. The Washington State University researchers will discuss the legal challenges and the novel workarounds they’ve developed in a Science Pub talk at 6 p.m. on Feb. 8 at Paradise Creek Brewery and on Zoom.
“We need this research urgently because these high potency products are being sold, and they’re very popular,” said Cuttler, an assistant professor of psychology. “As researchers, we have our hands tied and can’t really touch these products. It’s important to find workarounds, so that we can start to better understand their acute effects because there’s really been no research on them.”
Cuttler takes her studies out into the “wild” to better understand the effects of cannabis people actually use. She’s analyzed user-reported data from the Strainprint app and recently used Zoom to track and test psychological effects of cannabis on the users.