I’m looking into how the legalisation of cannabis cafe social enterprises can facilitate the emergence of new third places, and how their role within communities could help to reduce social isolation, improve community cohesion and reduce the harms of cannabis use.

I started with the idea that there aren’t enough spaces for adults and young adults especially to socialises, which I believe is contributing to the loneliness epidemic in the UK. In our first term we worked with Camarados, a charity who run public living rooms to help combat social isolation. My belief is that cannabis can and has created new and different spaces for people to create communities and find belonging in society, adding rather to the multitude of spaces and interactions that keep communities healthy.

My qualitative method has been to use the reviews of cannabis social clubs in Spain to see how they operate as third places and what makes the experience enjoyable and enriching. My quantitative method is using fermi estimation to work out what a cannabis cafe social enterprise model might look like in the UK.

I found it very hard to get quantitative data due to the illegality of cannabis as well as the model not existing anywhere else. So I decided to use mostly qualitative data initially. Once I had the idea for the fermi estimation, I planned out how the cafe might function, using survey information on people’s views towards the idea.4. Disciplinary Perspectives - how did they contribute to the process? For this project, I’ve had to use a number of disciplinary perspectives. Anthropology, Sociology, Neuropharmacology, Politics and some elements of business. Anthropology and Sociology formed a big basis for understanding how communities function and how humans have congregated around altered states of consciousness throughout history.

Neuropharmacology was useful in understanding how cannabis worked in the body and how the endocannabinoid system functions. I wanted to have a good grounding in the scientific literature to understand the real harms of cannabis without a lot of the myths and propaganda that’s floating around. Politics and Business to understand what it would take to make this a practical reality.

My product is hopefully going to be a concept design and brief for this cannabis community cafe which I hope to integrate into a video explaining the idea and the potential merits.

I’ve realised that research is not this cut and dry process. It involves a huge amount of creativity and resilience, so I’m proud of myself for working through the difficult patches and coming up with something interesting and practical.