EDMONTON–Communities with high immigrant populations tend to smoke less weed in Edmonton, according to a new survey.

A comprehensive survey released Thursday with research from Environics Analytics shows marijuana use across the country is highest among 19- to 34-year-olds.

That age group indulges fairly consistently throughout the Edmonton region, but less so in Mill Woods and in communities north of 137 Avenue.

“Mill Woods is highly ethnic, and so is north of Yellowhead Trail — Castle Downs and other places,” said urban planner and University of Alberta professor Sandeep Agrawal.

U of A sociologist Rob Shields said a recent census shows the north side is a mixture of new Canadians and couples with children.

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The survey shows little connection between marijuana use and income in Edmonton. While use is higher than average in lower-income neighbourhoods around 118 Avenue, it’s also high in affluent Sherwood Park, as well as the university area and east side communities like Capilano.

“To me, that’s interesting — the relatively even quality of this,” Shields said.

The data paints a wide-ranging portrait of Canada’s marijuana scene three months before recreational use becomes legal across the country on Oct. 17.

The information — most of which will be offered by subscription to groups with interests in the emerging market that legalization will trigger — touches on dozens of elements of use and distribution and drills down to the postal code level right across the nation.

Among other things, it shows:

41 per cent of Canadians under 35 have consumed cannabis at least once;

29 per cent of all Canadians older than 19 have tried the drug;

there is a $3.9 billion marijuana market in Canada, with the average price for a gram of pot being $7.36 nationwide;

and more than 38 million joints could be rolled from the amount of cannabis consumed annually in Edmonton, if each joint weighed 0.43 grams.

Rupen Seoni, a senior vice-president with Environics Analytics, said he cannot confidently predict at this time whether cannabis use will increase after legalization.

But public health records show that use of the drug in Colorado and Washington has not risen appreciatively since it was legalized in the two U.S. states in 2012.

Seoni said the factors driving cannabis use are uniform across the country and discernible imbibing concentrations emerge on survey maps of every Canadian city.

“What’s remarkable is when you look region by region, city by city, the propensity to use, or the propensity to have used at some point, is pretty similar,” he says.

“When you look over 35 (years old, for example) pretty much every region it’s somewhere around 25 per cent of the population … regardless of how you slice and dice.”

Even in Quebec, where opposition to legalization has been strongest, usage among those 19 to 34 is consistent with the same age cohort in other regions of the country, Seoni says.

“It’s the older age group in Quebec that’s driving that (opposition) because the younger people don’t look that different from the rest of the country,” he says.

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Seoni says this consistently elevated use of cannabis among 19- to 34-year-olds may simply reflect a high comfort level with the drug among the country’s millennials.

“It may be more than just money and (the) desire to party, it could also just be acceptance,” he says.

Though age and affluence are key determinants of usage, ethnicity also plays a major role, Seoni says.

For example, in youthful and wealthy areas of Markham, cannabis use runs below 29 per cent because of low usage among the large East Asian population in that city.

Education levels are also correlated with usage, but it’s unclear why or to what degree, Seoni says.

The education connection, he says, may simply reflect the reality that younger Canadians today tend to be better educated than previous generations.

“Whether you actually see higher rates as you go up the education scale among younger people … it’s kind of mixed here.”

The data, Seoni says, will be of interest to many different groups, especially as recreational potbecomes legally available in the fall.

“Whether you’re a producer, whether you’re the Ontario Cannabis Store, whether you’re public health trying to promote responsible use,” Seoni says.

“That fine-grained understanding of the group that you’re trying to talk to and their propensity to use, you really have to look at the details.”

Read more:

What’s that smell? In wealthy neighbourhoods it’s most likely weed

Calgarians aged 19 to 34 very likely to have used cannabis, survey suggests

Millennials are the most likely generation to have tried a toke

Seoni says the “CannabisInsights” data set also provides information on medicinal use of pot, the various motivations people have for imbibing, potential post-legalization habits and the effects of consumption.

The database was built from a 2018 survey by Vividata of some 5,000 people — a subset of the company’s much larger and ongoing survey of Canadian print media readership — on their use and attitudes towards marijuana.

Information from that survey was then plugged into Environics’ own data model, which tracks about 40,000 demographic variables in each of the approximately 860,000 postal code areas across the country.

“Based on the kinds of people who live in (any given postal code) neighbourhood, we would expect that X per cent of them consume cannabis, X per cent of them buy potato chips, etcetera,” Seoni says.

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