In 2023, the passage of Minnesota House File 100 enabled legislation for recreational cannabis. Dispensaries opened up shop, farmers started growing and breweries hopped on the Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) beverage trends. Since then, businesses, institutions and organizations have created systems of support for safer use of the drug.
Harm reduction, a model of care drawn from Indigenous practices and communities, works to destigmatize, normalize and encourage safe use. Tiger Simpson and Rachel Banen ’16, director and associate director of health promotion, use and encourage this concept at Macalester.
“We all practice harm reduction in our everyday lives around so many different things,” Banen said. “[Harm reduction] is destigmatiz[ing] what it means to use drugs or what it means to use alcohol, or even what it means to do risky things and [understanding] it’s just a part of living and living a life that best aligns with what you want to do.”
Health promotion, a branch of the Laurie Hamre Center for Health and Wellness, “seeks to address a wide range of social and environmental interventions rather than focusing on modifying individual behavior,” according to their website. During the conception of their harm reduction model, they concurred with the University of Washington and attended a cannabis summit to fine-tune their practices and policies.
“We focus primarily on two things,” Simpson said. “One being social norms, which can be understood as what we experience in our own lives; we tend to generalize for everybody. That’s not necessarily accurate, we do a lot of work to re-norm, and a lot of that data comes from surveys we conduct as a part of the Hamre Center, where we really work to understand what substance use trends [are] across campus.”
Health Promotion works with departments on campus and their Alcohol and Other Drug Advisory Committee (AODA) to talk about environmental and systemic impact, as well as clarifying specific policies and procedures. The AODA, made up of students, staff and faculty, works to ensure that the response to substance use is consistent across campus. Their initiatives include clearing up language in the handbook, presenting in first-year courses and improving access to harm reduction resources.
“We have the harm reduction cabinet [and] the resources we do because we’re a part of the Twin Cities community,” Simpson said. “So people can use those, and [they] don’t have to be Mac students. We want to inspire and encourage community belonging and support.”
This sentiment is shared by the state and is written into the legislation around recreational cannabis. The Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) was tasked with the creation of administrative rules, licensing businesses and regulating the state cannabis market. Since its conception, social equity has been at the forefront of its mission.
“Communities that had perhaps high enforcement of cannabis crimes often overlap with communities that suffer in other ways, like with access to nutritious food, to affordable housing, to adequate jobs,” OCM Communications Director Josh Collins ’99 said. “So the legislature wanted to have a significant focus on social equity, which really is an attempt to put first the people who were harmed by the enforcement of cannabis laws or that failed war on drugs.”
Minnesota OCM stands out from the other 24 states in their legislative approach. It works with previously illegal cultivators, recognizing and learning from their expertise while bringing them out of the illicit market through licensing. It allows tribal nations to self-regulate cannabis operations on and off tribal lands, and it administers grants in communities most affected by the previous illegality of the drug.
One of these communities of concern is college-aged students, where the risk of cannabis-induced psychosis is highest, and typically, knowledge around this and other risks is lowest. Health Promotion and OCM alike strive to increase messaging around understanding the risks of cannabis as well as promoting its safe use.
“From a regulatory standpoint, we want to know that Minnesotans are confident whether they go into a cannabis store that is on the land of a tribal nation,” Collins said. “Whether it’s a dispensary in downtown Duluth, [Minn.] or whether it’s a municipal dispensary that is operated by a city or county, they’re going to encounter the same types of safety components in the testing [so] that they can have the confidence that the products they’re buying are consistent, they’re safe, they’re well-labeled.”
While regulation standardizes products across the market, THC content varies within different products.
“[This makes] it harder for users, or people [who] want to use a substance to identify and really understand how much they see it’s saying sometimes we talk with alcohol,” Simpson said. “[If] you’re at 10 milligrams of THC, what does that actually mean?”
The cannabis landscape is continuing to take form as it remains illegal on a federal level and new research on its effects is published.
“Because cannabis is still a Schedule I drug at the federal level, it’s really hard to do research on it still,” Banen said. “All of the research around the short and long-term impacts of all of the different ways that we consume cannabis is very much emerging…The cart is ahead of the horse on this one with cannabis.”
In the minds of the general public, the ideas around cannabis consumption remain elusive across demographics. This makes it difficult from a public health perspective to manage messaging and understanding, especially between age groups.
“The THC content of the cannabis that was available [in the 70s and 80s] was a pretty low percent across the board,” Banen said.
“Now, our cannabis is much more highly potent, meaning that it is much harder to find cannabis that has that [lower] level of THC in it.”
The OCM considers the development and competition within the cannabis industry in balancing public health and safety with consumer confidence and market integrity.
“Our initial draft of the rules proposed a potency limit of 70 percent for concentrates, like a vape pen [which] caused huge pushback from the industry,’” Collins said. “We ended up moving to 80 percent, which is still lower than in some other states, but we felt that it appropriately balanced that sense of public health, of eliminating risk for exposure to young people.”
The complex nature of regulation of an industry that concerns public health and the mixed messaging around safety and usage, means a lot of the education falls onto smaller, community-based initiatives, such as within Health Promotion.
“How do we get people [with] knowledge [and] education to make the choices they want to make?” Simpson asked. “And then going past that, how do we build skills to do those things and make those choices easier to make? How do we create an environment where there is destigmatization, there is community, belonging and understanding?”
