Cannabis and research do not have a long, happy history together.
For decades, cannabis research was suppressed by the government as a tool of prohibition. Positive research findings threatened the propaganda of the devil’s lettuce and the monopoly of single-molecule medicine.
Today, when cannabis is legal for nearly half of Americans recreationally and even more medicinally, cannabis research is exploding. But traditional research mediums are costly, time-intensive, and still biased. So what are cannabis companies and consumers to do?
Take the matter into their own hands with consumer-based cannabis research.
What is Consumer-Based Research?
There is no formal definition of consumer-based research. Traditional scientific research is conducted using the scientific method, a model of knowledge acquisition that has been used for centuries.
It begins with an observation and a question: why does X cause Y, can X do this and that to Y, and so on. From there, a scientist develops a hypothesis, a predicted outcome or answer. To test this hypothesis, an experiment is designed. This experiment must be carefully controlled and test as few variables as possible: one variable at a time is the gold standard. Data is gathered from these tests and then analyzed to find a conclusion. It is a solid model that has worked well for centuries.
But cannabis throws a wrench in these works as it does for so many things. Cannabis is not a single molecule: it is an entire plant made up of hundreds of different compounds that all work together synergistically to cause an effect.
Consumer-based research, often called real-world data gathering, takes the scientific process out of the lab and into the world. There is no extreme vetting of participants to ensure they meet rigorous control models. There is no isolated lab setting where the trials and struggles of the outside world fall away. There is no focus on a single molecule.
Instead, consumer-based research seeks to put consumers in a real setting and see what happens. Data is still gathered in a robust and comprehensive manner before being analyzed. The result is faster, more cost-effective, and often, more indicative of real-world results than traditional research models.
How Consumer-Based Research Studies Collect Data
One of the biggest challenges with taking research outside the lab is ensuring participants can provide robust and standardized data on their experiences. That’s where MoreBetter comes in. The company began as a cannabis journaling app to help medical patients gain a better understanding of how certain products affected their symptoms.
MoreBetter was born to help alternative medicine companies gather real-world consumer results to better tailor their marketing efforts. If 1,000 people weighed in on the effects of a supplement or cannabis product, the company would know which claims were actually backed by experience, and which fell short.
To date, MoreBetter has run over dozens of real-world data collections with 15 published studies.
“Traditional research models can be archaic in their timelines and cost-prohibitive for small brands who don’t have tens of millions of dollars to spend on research,” said Tyler Dautrich, COO of MoreBetter. “The pace of innovation in cannabis is crazy. It can take anywhere from nine to 24 months for a single study to publish, so it’s easy to feel like research will never catch up with the industry.”
MoreBetter aims to help businesses systematically collect structured data from consumers in a way that meets the standard of the observational scientific method, where researchers observe and record behaviors without manipulating them. If you want to contribute to a study, join MoreBetter’s email list to get notified when new data collections launch.
MoreBetter began seeing more interest in consumer-based research back in 2020, when clinical research was halted. “Real-world data collection can continue to push research forward. It can become a first step, rather than waiting for traditional research to catch up.”
Reaching Out to Actual Cannabis Consumers
Many organizations are taking the task of advancing cannabis data into their own hands. Riley Kirk is the CEO and co-founder of the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy (NAP), an organization formed by two stoner scientists to “accelerate research and public education for cannabis, psychedelics, and other natural medicines by prioritizing lived experience.” Her background in academic research left her disenfranchised by how traditional research models treated both cannabis and cannabis consumers.
“Traditional models of research in biochemistry are looking at a single molecule on a single receptor to make assumptions. Cannabis is complex with hundreds of molecules. Bodies are complex with hundreds of receptors and endocannabinoids. We don’t have the research tool to evaluate that level of complexity.” Kirk said.
In late 2023, NAP launched its first study, a longitudinal study open to anyone over the age of 18 in the US who consumed cannabis in partnership with MoreBetter. 91% of over 1,000 participants were daily cannabis consumers.
“Most other medications that people are on, they’re meant to be taken daily. But when you consume cannabis daily, you’re seen as “dependent.” Kirk said. “This research showed that daily consumers still have a high quality of life. What’s more, when we shared these findings with our audience, there was a huge sense of reassurance – it’s a community of people who medicate.”
Cannabis and its multitude of molecules can present a highly personalized medicine for people, particularly once their unique endocannabinoid system is understood. Kirk believes that consumer-based research is the future of cannabis medicine because of this.
“We have to capture that diversity of effects, be it negative or positive, from cannabis consumers. You cannot replicate real-world results through AI, or in vitro, or with an algorithm.” Kirk said. “Traditional research models move so slowly that by the time a study publishes, those [cannabis] products may not even be available anymore – or the legal infrastructure may have changed. Being able to quickly collect data is a snapshot of what’s happening in the real world.”
Closing the Gap for Women’s Pain Through Real-World Data Collections
Megan Mbengue, founder of Trusted Canna Nurse, agrees.
“A lot of the gold standard of research doesn’t reflect real-world use. We have to be able to reflect real-world use with real people.”
Mbengue also partnered with MoreBetter to conduct data collection on her cannabis suppositories. There is a massive gap in both research and product offerings for women dealing with pain, particularly cycle-related pain. Cannabis presents a unique opportunity to close this gap, which is what motivated Mbengue to create this product and self-fund this data collection.
“Suppositories are challenging to study because they’re considered a medical device [not medication.] But we know anecdotally suppositiories have been used for thousands of years. We’re just lacking objective scientific data.” said Mbengue
Her data collection started with 103 people and ended with 79 participants. The results were astounding – 94% agreed that they helped with period cramps. Adverse reactions were less than 5%.
(Editor’s note: The author of this article participated in this collection. She was not compensated financially for her time during the study or to include any companies in this article.)
Improving Cannabis Products Through Consumer Research
Consumer-based research can also help identify gaps in products that are lowering consumer experience.
Active, a cannabis vape brand, launched their consumer-based research study “Getting High for Science” to create a better vape for cannabis concentrates.
When Randy Reed, Vice President of Science, joined the company, he noticed an odd discrepancy: the puff machines used to test the vapes in the labs were based off protocols developed for nicotine vapes. But cannabis concentrates have a completely different viscosity than e-cig liquid. When he dug in further, he found that almost all of the research on vapes was based on nicotine and e-cig liquids.
“The flow rate and draw durations of e-cigarettes is quite different from cannabis concentrates. Nicotine devices are based on Newtonian fluids, but cannabis concentrates are non-Newtonian fluids – a huge difference for heating devices.” Reed said. “Even within cannabis, the ideal temperature and draw rate changes based on the specific type of concentrate. There’s going to be a huge variation on how [your vape] hits based on the type of extract, but all vape devices are expected to work with anything.”
So Active got to work, designing an experiment for human puff topography for cannabis vapes. They ended up with 350 participants for the “human puff profile”, a scientific measurement of how people hit cannabis vapes.
If that sounds a little in the weeds to you, it is. But details like draw duration, flow rate, viscosity, and resaturation time have a massive difference in how well a vape pen hits. Turns out, cannabis consumers hit their vapes with a higher force for longer durations, but not as frequently as e-cig vapes. These pauses are important: as a non-Newtonian fluid, resaturation time is crucial for the coils in cannabis vapes – but not a consideration for e-cigs. Cannabis vapes also need longer to heat up: e-cig technology in a cannabis vape means it heats up too quickly, which can lead to coil burnout and even the release of toxic byproducts.
Active’s findings, expected to publish in Q3 of 2025, have helped Reed and his team create better internal technology for disposable and reusable cannabis vapes.
“[Cannabis] is an emerging industry with big knowledge gaps, especially compared to Nicotine, which has tons of consumer-based research. In terms of the scientific community, it’s still quite early on for cannabis.” Reed said.
Ensuring Scientific Validity for Consumer-Based Research
Of course, traditional research models don’t like to share space, so there are steps brands must take to ensure their findings are seen as scientifically valid.
“There is no set standard for how many people are required to set a clinical standard in research,” Dautrich said. “There are clinical studies with less than 30 people. But if there’s less than that in a real-world data collection, it can be easier for pharmaceutical companies to poke holes in the findings. There’s power in larger sample sizes.”
Mbengue encountered this as well. “Someone said it [our study] wasn’t controlled because people could use other methods of pain management [in addition] but in the real world, people use multiple tools.”
While real-world data collections often aren’t taken seriously by the mainstream medical community, Mbengue hopes to change that. She’s working on writing up the results of this study to publish in a cannabis-focused scientific journal. “This research can drive future clinical trials by proving significant improvements in outcomes that can be done in randomized, controlled trials.”
Dautrich and the MoreBetter team are also pushing for more publications off real-word data collection; his team has published 15 studies to date.
Reed agrees. “This data is huge for consumer safety because people use these devices for medical purposes.” If they’re not designed with cannabis in mind, vapes work less effectively and may even have unintended dangerous results.
The Future of Cannabis Research is Consumers
One of the reasons consumer-based research may be gaining popularity is because it’s done by cannabis consumers, for cannabis consumers – not traditional government institutions.
“Trust is what traditional academia is missing,” Kirk said. “Most traditional research is funded by the government, who prohibits cannabis, arrests people for this plant, and ruins lives over it. People don’t want to take part in government research with researchers who haven’t consumed cannabis and don’t understand it. No one in the cannabis community trusts the government, especially personal consumption information like where they’re getting their products.”
Ain’t that the truth?
Consumer-based research has several advantages over traditional models: it moves quicker, costs less, and considers real-world impact, not the isolation of a lab. While traditional research models are still vitally important for continuing to prove cannabis’ overall safety and medical value, the cannabis industry is in desperate need of more research, now – especially as alternative cannabinoids like HHC and Delta-8 THC grow in prevalence. In the absence of understanding, all cannabinoids are grouped together – and that is an infamy the industry cannot afford.
The future of cannabis research is the same as the future of cannabis: community.
