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Dr. Miyabe Shields, PhD and Dr. Riley Kirk, PhD are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram to … [+]
Love it or hate it, social media can be a powerful tool for education and data collection. While the subject of cannabis often triggers the removal of content and banned accounts, pharmaceutical scientists Dr. Riley Kirk, PhD and Dr. Miyabe Shields, PhD are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram to help followers understand cannabis pharmacology, while gathering unique data on their experiences with it.
A Synergistic Relationship
When Kirk and Shields first became familiar with one another, it wasn’t at an academic conference or through an industry organization—it was on TikTok. After a little hesitancy about using social media, Shields (@miyabephd on TikTok and Instagram) made a video about cannabis and mental health, and was surprised when people engaged with the subject. She was even more surprised to learn that she wasn’t the only cannabis scientist making content.
“I scrolled the app for the first time, and the second thing that came up for me was Riley with a video on GPCR signalling,” remembers Shields. “She was explaining the molecular mechanism of how the [g-protein coupled] receptor works. I thought, ‘I’ve never seen someone explain that in a better way than in this 30-second TikTok.’”
At the time, Shields was living in Boston and Kirk was finishing up graduate school and working as a teaching assistant at the University of Rhode Island’s cannabis program. “I started making videos about cannabis pharmacology and how it works in the body, and I didn’t think anybody would care,” says Kirk. Today, she has over 378,000 followers (@cannabichem).
Shields learned quickly that the two scientists had more in common than an interest in making educational cannabis content: they both specialize in drug discovery, which involves identifying molecules and the targets in the body to which they are best suited.
“We’re like the two halves of the major components of drug discovery: the molecules are Riley and I’m the target in the body,” says Shields.
Making Cannabis Pharmacology Accessible
It was clear after connecting on the app and then in person, at one point even meeting up on the side of a freeway between Boston and Rhode Island to smoke a joint and make a video, that the two should work together, both online and off.
“We have this opinion that we share about drug discovery, drug use and lifestyle that is not mirrored in other scientists, but that is mirrored in the general public,” says Shields. “We are viewed as radical scientists, especially because we’re open about our cannabis use.”
Together, not only are they generating educational content and engaging with “a specific population of nerdy cannabis users who want to understand the science,” says Kirk; they’ve written academic papers and recently published a chapter in a textbook about the pharmaceutical applications of hemp.
What Their Data Says
Can you feel edibles? When did you first use cannabis? Do you prefer edibles or smoking? These are just a few of the questions Kirk and Shields are asking on social media—and with thousands of respondents across multiple platforms, some of the results have been surprising.
When they made videos about edibles, some users commented saying they “couldn’t feel them.” At a symposium in 2021, Shields asked a group of researchers if they’d ever heard of this phenomenon. Only a medical doctor in the audience said he’d seen it in some of his patients and guessed that it affected about 20 percent of them.
Kirk and Shields then created a TikTok asking their followers if they could feel edibles, and found that across nearly 25,000 respondents, about 21 percent said they weren’t affected by them.
In another video, they asked followers how old they were when they first used cannabis. While there is scientific data on age, Kirk and Shields argue that existing data sets are often skewed to 16 or 17 because people fear answering truthfully will lead to consequences. Of almost 23,000 respondents, the average responses to their TikTok polls were 14 and 15.
“The whole reason behind doing this was to start the conversation of shifting cannabis education towards younger people, because we mostly focus on people at dispensaries, where you have to be a certain age just to get in the door,” says Kirk.
While their short videos offer followers a basic understanding of complex concepts, Kirk and Shields’ podcast, Smoke N’ Science, offers a place to dive into the subjects more deeply. “Educating online, you have a certain amount of attention, it’s like a currency,” says Kirk. “On the podcast, it’s much more organic. We can put all this educational information in context.”
Reflecting on their podcast, Shields notes that it recently hit 50,000 downloads. “It would have taken us both over 10 years in academia to teach that many students, and we did it in less than a year.”
Academia Slow To Accept TikTok Data
Kirk and Shields’ content has been a hit with hundreds of thousands of people across TikTok and Instagram, but some scientists haven’t responded with the same kind of appreciation. For example, Kirk explains, when the two submitted a paper for academic review that contained data they collected on the video-dominant apps, they were told by one reviewer that their data was considered “less valid,” and should be repeated on apps like Facebook or Twitter—even though there are currently more than 1 billion users on Instagram, and about as many on TikTok.
Kirk says she and Shields are more concerned with what their followers have to say.
“People are contributing to our research and then immediately interacting with the scientists and getting answers to questions they’ve had,” she says.
“It’s a more complete circle to me. Studies seem so distant, because you don’t know the people participating in them, you don’t know the researchers, and you probably don’t have access to the paper. We’re trying to bring people together, to care about and contribute to the research.”