Frequently Asked Questions

The Cannabis Awareness and Prevention Toolkit is an online, educational resource that can be adapted to fit the individual needs of educators and students in all types of settings, including elementary, middle and high schools; community-based organizations; and health-related agencies.

Educators are encouraged to pick and choose which lessons will be most useful for their students and adapt activities to suit their needs. You will find that the PowerPoints, worksheets, and activities can all be altered as desired. Please also review the Crash Courses included in certain modules for more information for educators and parents, and please see the Resources section that provides additional information and websites that are relevant to educators, parents, youth, and others who are interested.

The Cannabis Awareness and Prevention Toolkit is a new, theory-based and evidence-informed educational resource created by educators and researchers working with middle and high school students.

We recognize that young people are going to hear a lot of positive and negative messages about cannabis, but that is because people have strong opinions about it. We as a Toolkit team believe that scare tactics are ineffective and information is power (read more about our basic principles here). By looking at both sides we hope that educators can have honest and non-judgmental conversations about cannabis with their students.

The visuals of cannabis/cannabis products are intended to be useful for young people, for them to see what the look like so they can identify them and associate these products with the health risks we cover in the curriculum.

We never want to glamorize the products or demonize them, which we know can turn off an audience of young people who want the facts about cannabis. We’re always careful about how we depict these products throughout the curriculum, to ensure that we aren’t enticing young people and making them a better consumer of the cannabis industry. We as a Toolkit team believe that scare tactics are ineffective and information is power (read more about our basic principles here).

As with any curriculum from our Toolkit, you are welcome to modify the slide set by removing or adding any slides to tailor it the specific needs of your students. For example, if there is a specific slide that you think won’t work well or may distract students from the main points you’re attempting to make, then feel free to modify or remote it.

Although there has been increased interest in educational posters based on key messages presented throughout the Toolkit, we have not finalized any yet. 

For information-dense resources on various topics, we recommend reviewing the educator crash courses in our website modules.

For visual aids or classroom posters, we recommend doing the following:

1. Modify slides from our PowerPoint presentations and/or factsheets to serve as posters and/or brochures.
2. Review our social media accounts for recently posted visuals that you can use as posters.

Below are the links to our Facebook and Twitter pages. We also highlight relevant news, curricula updates and new activities. 

• www.facebook.com/TobaccoPrevToolkit/
• www.twitter.com/StanfordTPT or @StanfordTPT

The Cannabis Awareness & Prevention Toolkit is committed to providing free adolescent use prevention materials to educators directly working with youth. No special permissions are needed to use the Toolkit. Everything on the Toolkit website and trainings are free of charge.

Please note that in addition to the restrictions contained in the Terms of Use, it is prohibited for anyone to use or modify the Toolkit in connection with any project or program operated, sponsored or otherwise funded in whole or in part by anyone or any entity who is in the business of selling products that contain tobacco, nicotine, and/or cannabis/marijuana. 

We welcome Toolkit users to modify materials to fit your audience’s needs. However, we do ask that you give us credit/follow the Terms of Use by preserving the Toolkit logo or website URL on all materials that you decide to share. If you are making modifications that you think would be relevant to others, please let us know as we are always open to feedback. Contact us.

Yes, as long as there is no connection with any project or program operated, sponsored or otherwise funded in whole or in part by anyone or any entity who is in the business of selling products that contain tobacco, nicotine, and/or cannabis/marijuana.

The Toolkit is evidence-informed and is based on the most current research available. We work closely with our colleagues in research, education, and medicine to keep the Toolkit as up-to-date as possible. 

No formal training is required to use the Toolkit, but we do ask that you let us know if you are conducting trainings on using it. We are interested in collecting this information for use in our analyses and summary reports that we provide to funders.

1.     After our soft launch, we heard from a more extended network of community members who had varying opinions on our use of the term "marijuana.” We therefore reconsidered the term, taking into account its history and connotations and concluded that "cannabis" is a more science-based, culturally neutral term that accurately identifies the products covered in our materials.  

2.     We have included the word "Awareness" in our title to indicate that the materials within our Toolkit are intended not only to prevent use by youth who currently do not use cannabis/marijuana but also to encourage youth to consider decreasing, delaying, or stopping the use of cannabis/marijuana for those who are current users or those who are exceptionally curious..

Our goal with this Toolkit is to provide nonjudgemental, evidence-based information about cannabis/marijuana to educators and the youth they work with. (You can find more about our history and philosophy here: http://med.stanford.edu/cannabispreventiontoolkit/about.html

As always, we welcome feedback from our extended community and are grateful to have the opportunity to work with you all in your efforts to empower youth in their health decision making. 

We link to information that we find relevant in our Resource Page.

We do not receive any from funding from any tobacco/nicotine and/or cannabis/marijuana industry, nor do we otherwise collaborate with them.

You can email us at CanPrevToolkit@stanford.edu