In-Home Cannabis Smoking Among a Cannabis-Using Convenience Sample from the Global Drug Survey: With Weighted Estimates for US Respondents

Introduction: Secondhand and thirdhand tobacco smoke exposure most often occur at home, but little is known about occurrences of in-home cannabis smoking. We ascertained in-home cannabis smoking reported by all cannabis-using (i.e., used in the last 12 months) respondents to the Global Drug Survey (GDS; international-GDS sample), and among U.S. cannabis-using respondents (US-GDS sample).Materials and Methods: We used data collected November 2019-January 2020 for the 2020 GDS, an annual anonymous, cross-sectional survey; respondents were 16+ years old, from 191 countries. We estimated any and daily in-home cannabis smoking in the last 30 days among international-GDS respondents (n=63,797), using mixed effects logistic regression. US-GDS respondents (n=6,580) were weighted to the covariate distribution of the nationally representative 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health cannabis-using sample, using inverse odds probability weighting, to make estimates more generalizable to the U.S. cannabis-using population.Results: For the international-GDS cannabis-using respondents, any in-home cannabis smoking was reported by 63.9% of men, 61.9% of women, and 68.6% of nonbinary people; and by age (<25 years old=62.7%, 25-34 years old=65.0%, and 35+ years old=62.8%). Daily in-home cannabis smoking was highest among nonbinary (28.7%) and respondents 35+ years of age (28.0%). For the weighted US-GDS cannabis-using respondents, any in-home cannabis smoking was reported by 49.8% of males and 61.2% of females; and by age (<25 years old=62.6%, 25-34 years old=41.8%, 35+ years old=57.9%). Weighted daily in-home smoking was 23.2% among males and 37.1% among females; by age (<25 years old=34.8%, 25-34 years old=27.8%, and 35+ years old=21.6%).Conclusions: There was high daily cannabis smoking in homes of international-GDS and US-GDS respondents who used cannabis in the last 12 months. In part, due to cannabis legalization, the number of users worldwide has increased over the past decade. Criminal stigma historically associated with cannabis continues to drive those users indoors. In this context, our findings support further investigation of cannabis use behavior to understand how often people are exposed to secondhand and thirdhand cannabis smoke and the consequences of that exposure.