Cannabis-related Content in North American Post-Secondary Curricula: A Scoping Review

On August 11, 2016, the Canadian government announced the new Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR) outlining reasonable cannabis use for medical purposes. Educators teaching cannabis-related content face challenges as the new legalization requires a shift away from a focus on substance abuse towards incorporating economic, social, and health promotion aspects. This presentation shares the first of a multi-stage project to investigate how recent and proposed changes to cannabis legalization are being incorporated to post-secondary curricula in North America. A scoping review of peer-reviewed and grey literature was conducted to answer this question. This research was initially conducted with a focus on schools of nursing and is currently being expanded to include other disciplines. Early findings suggest that peer-reviewed nursing articles emphasize teaching cannabis in terms of substance abuse treatment rather than knowledge about medical cannabis. An online search of available cannabis-related content, within English-speaking Canadian universities/colleges that have a nursing school, reveals that many cannabis-related courses are being developed. These include different disciplines such as pharmacology, agriculture, and marketing and are delivered in the format of courses, workshops/seminars, and public presentations in classroom or online. How many of these are or will be part of nursing school curricula remains unclear at this stage