Mosaic-patterned windows, hanging bar lights and wooden shelves lined with colorful packages: Behind an unassuming door in the Clinical Sciences Building at Health Sciences Campus, what comes into view defies expectations of a traditional laboratory. This is the CANNEX, a mock cannabis dispensary developed by the Prevention, Early Intervention, and Addictions Recovery Lab at USC.

Built from what once were office spaces, the CANNEX — short for the Cannabis Annex — mimics a boutique-style cannabis dispensary, including price tags, product displays, decorative plants and a bar counter. The products lining its shelves are empty containers of cannabis products selected from brands that are popular in Los Angeles dispensaries.

Completed in January, the CANNEX simulates a retail experience where research participants shop and indicate which products are the most appealing. Adam Leventhal, director of the Institute for Addiction Science supporting the project, said the CANNEX allows researchers to determine and experiment with factors — such as price, graphic design or warning labels — that may lead people to purchase certain cannabis products.

The goal, Leventhal said, is to use the data to create policies in cannabis packaging that lead people to purchase less harmful products and to use the purchased products more safely.

The research team visited local cannabis dispensaries and gathered advice from budtenders to get inspiration for the CANNEX’s design. Ireland Shute, project manager of PEARL, said they wanted the place to be welcoming and authentic when setting up the CANNEX.

“We put all of the vapes together. We put all of the edibles in one section. Tinctures, topicals — more medical products [are] here in the middle ,” Shute said. “We were advised to put more expensive products higher up on the shelves, intermixed with more high potency products as well, just to emulate how companies would do it in a real dispensary.”

Eric Pedersen, lab director of the PEARL and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said the research team developed the CANNEX because they wanted a space in which they could control every detail of cannabis packaging. 

“We can change the prices. We can change the names,” Pedersen said. “We can put a picture of a cartoon on one of these things and say, ‘If you have people that are underage and come in here, are they more willing to touch a product or be drawn to a product that has a cartoon on it?’”

The adaptability of the simulated CANNEX products lends itself to research, Leventhal said. Products can gain and lose warning labels in between trials and researchers can examine the impact those labels had on purchasing behavior. He said the resulting data will provide strong, realistic conclusions that apply to the real world.

Shute said the CANNEX will motivate participation in addiction studies by providing privacy to participants. Conducting studies in the CANNEX would also prevent disrupting sales of actual cannabis dispensaries, she said.

But, the CANNEX still faces limitations in its goal to replicate an actual cannabis retail experience, Shute said, such as a need to periodically update the packaging to ensure their simulated products stay relevant. 

“Unless you’re getting new packaging, it feels like every single day your stock might not be what’s representative of the current products on the market,” Shute said.

Because the CANNEX does not stock cannabis, Pedersen said researchers can’t perfectly simulate the retail experience because there are no physical products for research participants to interact with other than empty pre-rolls — packed cannabis products wrapped in rolling paper. 

“When people buy flower [products], they like to look at [them], and they’ll buy it because it has certain colors. And they also like to smell it,” Pedersen said. “We can’t do that with the bud or the flower.”

Leventhal said the CANNEX and its ability to provide cannabis-related research data are important as California struggles to determine what packaging policies will help keep the public safe and knowledgeable about cannabis products. 

“[Cannabis policy] is an evolving landscape, so we’re just really enthusiastic about the opportunity to provide some of the key essential data that would inform that and really protect the public,” Leventhal said.