Smoking Is Still Most Popular Ingestion Method

Maybe we just love the smoke rings? To no one's surprise, cannabis consumers are most likely to choose to ingest their cannabinoids via smoking as opposed to other routes of administration, according to data published in the journal Addiction.

A researcher from the University of California at San Diego assessed marijuana consumption patterns among nationally representative sample of participants. Consistent with prior studies, he reported that the most commonly reported ingestion method was smoking (64 percent).

Preferences differ between patients, personal users

Those who reported consuming cannabis for personal, non-medical purposes were more likely to acknowledge smoking as their primary method of ingestion. Adult-use-only consumers were also more likely to report vaporizing cannabis.

By contrast, medical marijuana users were far more likely to acknowledge using cannabis topicals as were other adult consumers. Over half of the respondents who reported using cannabis for both personal and medical purposes acknowledged using "combustion methods nearly every day."

The author concluded: "[T]his study provide[s] the most recent nationally representative description of cannabis administration methods with particularly good representations in male, older, and minority respondents, who were often underrepresented in previous studies using online panels."