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Twitter data offer new possibilities for tracking health-related communications. This study is among the first to apply advanced information processing to identify geographic and content features of cannabis-related tweeting in the United States.

Tweets were collected using streaming Application Programming Interface (March–May 2016) and were processed by eDrugTrends to identify geolocation and classify content by source (personal communication, media, retail) and sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). States were grouped by cannabis legalization policies into “recreational,” “medical, less restrictive,” “medical, more restrictive,” and “illegal.” Permutation tests were performed to analyze differences among four groups in adjusted percentages of all tweets, unique users, personal communications only, and positive-to-negative sentiment ratios.

About 30% of all 13,233,837 cannabis …