FEASIBILITY OF USING CROWDSOURCED WEBSITE DATA TO MEASURE THE AVAILABILITY OF HOME DELIVERY OF LEGAL INTOXICANTS: A PILOT STUDY

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated demand for home delivery services for alcohol and cannabis-products traditionally accessed through brick-and-mortar outlets. Many governments have relaxed long-standing public health regulations to permit expanded online ordering, takeout, and home delivery. This evolving landscape of availability could have important implications for the epidemiology of alcohol and cannabis consumption and related problems. However, research on the home delivery of commercially available intoxicants remains alarmingly sparse, in part due to a lack of data. Prior research demonstrated that crowdsourced websites can be used to validly enumerate brick-and-mortar cannabis outlets. We piloted an extension of this method to measure availability of cannabis home delivery in California. Methods and data We webscraped data from Weedmaps, the largest crowdsourced website for commercial cannabis, to quantify the number of cannabis retailers delivering to specific locations across California. We counted retailers reporting to offer home delivery to the geographical centroid of each Census block group, and compared these to counts of the number of brick-and-mortar outlets within each block group. To shed further light on data quality, we conducted follow-up telephone calls with a subsample of cannabis delivery retailers. Results: Of the 23,212 block groups assessed, 22,730 (98%) were served by at least one cannabis delivery business. In contrast, only 461 block groups (2%) contained at least one brick-and-mortar cannabis outlet. Telephone interviews raised questions about how physical availability should be defined for home delivery businesses. Whereas physical proximity from a brick-and-mortar outlet to a residential address is fixed in space and time, the availability of home delivery varied dynamically as a function of staffing levels, order sizes, time of day, competition, and demand. Conclusions: Webscraping crowdsourced websites could be a viable method for quantifying the availability of cannabis and alcohol home delivery. However, key practical and conceptual challenges must be overcome to proceed with a full-scale validation and methodological standards. Despite limitations, our pilot data suggest that cannabis home delivery is now nearly universal in California, while access to brick-and-mortar outlets is relatively limited, underscoring the need for research on home delivery.