Ian Holloway, associate professor of social welfare, has received a grant of more than $400,000 from the California Bureau of Cannabis Control to advance his research into the impact of cannabis marketing targeting sexual and gender minority youth. The growing cannabis industry is aggressively pitching its products to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth through online and print media, Holloway said. His research will seek to measure the reach of that messaging and determine whether it leads to greater cannabis use among this group of young people. Filling these knowledge gaps could help explain cannabis-related health disparities among LGBTQ youth and identify targets for regulation of cannabis marketing, he said. Holloway is director of the Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice at UCLA Luskin and a member of the Cannabis Research Initiative at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He and Evan Krueger, a post-doctoral scholar at USC’s Health, Emotion & Addiction Laboratory, are principal investigators of the study. Their grant from the Bureau of Cannabis Control is a portion of nearly $30 million recently awarded to California universities to study the impact of Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use of cannabis for people 21 or older. Across UCLA, faculty and research centers have been awarded $6.4 million from the bureau to study topics including the toxicity of inhaled and second-hand cannabis smoke and employment conditions in California’s cannabis industry. UCLA’s extended track record for cutting-edge cannabis research dates as far back as the 1970s.