Cannabis Drinks Linked to Less Alcohol Use, Better Sleep: Study

August 20, 2026

Photo by Majkl Velner via Unsplash.

Two studies landed within a few months of each other, and together they're already changing how the cannabis beverage industry talks to customers. One came out of a university research lab and went through peer review. The other came from a company with a financial stake in the answer. Both point in the same direction: people who drink THC-infused beverages say they're drinking less alcohol, sleeping better, and feeling calmer. That's a striking claim for a product category that barely existed five years ago, and it's worth digging into what these studies actually found, who paid for them, and how much weight the findings can really carry.

The Buffalo Study: Cannabis as Harm Reduction

Photo by Martijn Baudoin via Unsplash.

The more rigorous of the two studies comes out of the University at Buffalo, published under the title The Exploration of Cannabis Beverage Substitution for Alcohol: A Novel Harm Reduction Strategy. The authors, Jessica S. Kruger, Nicholas Felicione, and Daniel J. Kruger, submitted the paper to the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs on July 1, 2025, saw it accepted on November 5, and had it published online on January 14, 2026, carrying the DOI 10.1080/02791072.2026.2614506. That timeline matters because it means the paper went through actual peer review, not just a press release.

The research team surveyed 438 anonymous adults who reported using cannabis at some point in the past year, asking detailed questions about both their cannabis habits and their drinking patterns. The results were not subtle. People who used cannabis beverages reported cutting their weekly alcohol consumption by roughly half, and they binge drank noticeably less often than before they started using cannabis drinks. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they had either reduced their alcohol intake substantially or stopped drinking altogether once cannabis beverages entered the picture.

The survey wasn't distributed in a vacuum. The researchers worked with Premier Earth and Star Buds, two New York State-licensed dispensaries in the Buffalo area, to reach people who were already buying cannabis products. That's a practical way to find a relevant sample, though it also means the pool skews toward people already comfortable enough with dispensaries to fill out a survey handed to them at checkout.

Why Beverages Might Beat Other Cannabis Products for Cutting Alcohol

Photo by AIII YOOOO via Unsplash.

What stands out to the research team isn't just that cannabis beverage drinkers cut back on alcohol -- it's that they cut back more than people who primarily use flower, edibles, or other cannabis formats. Co-author Daniel Kruger described this as a genuinely surprising finding, since there's no obvious pharmacological reason why THC in liquid form would suppress drinking more effectively than THC in a gummy or a joint.

The explanation the researchers lean toward has less to do with chemistry and more to do with habit and hand-to-mouth behavior. Having a can or bottle to hold, sip, and set down on a bar or coffee table replicates the physical ritual of drinking a beer or mixing a cocktail. For a lot of people, the urge to drink socially is tied as much to that repeated motion and the social cue of holding a drink as it is to craving alcohol itself. A cannabis beverage lets someone keep the ritual while swapping out the substance.

Jessica Kruger, the study's first author, frames this as the first research of its kind to position cannabis explicitly as a harm reduction tool for alcohol specifically. Harm reduction conversations in public health have mostly centered on opioids -- needle exchanges, naloxone access, safer supply programs. Alcohol, despite being legal, widely used, and responsible for enormous health costs, rarely gets discussed through that same lens. Kruger is careful not to oversell the finding, though. She's been explicit that this framing has a long way to go before public health officials or physicians treat it as a legitimate, mainstream recommendation rather than an interesting survey result.

The MoreBetter Study: Sleep, Stress and Mood

On days when participants used cannabis beverages, they self-reported the largest gains in overall wellbeing (23%) and stress reduction (18%), with smaller but notable improvements in pain (11%) and sleep (7%).

The second study comes from MoreBetter, a research and marketing firm that released its findings on November 5, 2025 -- coincidentally the same day the Buffalo paper was accepted for publication. This one was bigger in scale, tracking more than 3,000 participants over a 22-day period. Participants used one of 20 different beverages infused with THC, CBN, CBG, or CBD, sourced from sponsor brands including BREZ, Cantrip, Nowadays, Hippie Water, Hightail, and Herbal Oasis.

The topline numbers are dramatic. Daily alcohol use among participants dropped from a 32.9 percent baseline down to 20.1 percent by the end of the tracking period, a 12.7 percentage point decrease in less than a month. On the days participants used a cannabis beverage instead of drinking, they reported an average 11 percent decrease in pain, an 18 percent reduction in stress, and sleep that ran about 7 percent longer compared to days when they didn't use the products.

Taken together, those daily effects added up to a broader shift in how people rated their own wellbeing. By the close of the study window, overall wellbeing scores among participants had climbed 23 percent from where they started. For a category that's often marketed on vibes and lifestyle imagery, this is the kind of data a beverage brand can point to directly, and MoreBetter's client list clearly intends to.

A Necessary Caveat: Self-Reported Data and Industry Funding

Photo by Artem Podrez via Pexels.

Neither of these studies is a clinical trial, and that distinction matters more than it might seem. Both rely on participants self-reporting their own drinking, sleep, stress, and mood -- there's no blood alcohol testing, no polysomnography for sleep quality, no control group receiving a placebo beverage. Self-report data is useful for spotting patterns worth investigating further, but it's vulnerable to memory bias, social desirability bias, and the simple fact that people who volunteer for a survey about cannabis beverages may already be predisposed to view them favorably.

The MoreBetter study carries an additional wrinkle: it was sponsored by the very beverage brands whose products were being tested. BREZ, Cantrip, Nowadays, Hippie Water, Hightail, and Herbal Oasis all have a direct commercial interest in consumers believing their drinks reduce alcohol use and improve sleep. That doesn't mean the data is fabricated, but it's a real conflict of interest that deserves the same scrutiny anyone would apply to industry-funded research in any other product category, from supplements to pharmaceuticals.

Even the peer-reviewed Buffalo study, which is the stronger of the two by academic standards, worked from an anonymous self-report survey of 438 people recruited through two dispensary partners -- a modest sample size for drawing sweeping conclusions. Jessica Kruger herself has stressed that this research is exploratory, not proof that cannabis beverages belong in a doctor's office as an alcohol-reduction treatment. And practically speaking, cannabis beverages are only legal where a state or country has established an adult-use or medical cannabis program; rules on what can be sold, where, and to whom vary widely, so anyone interested in trying these products should check their local law before buying.

A Growing Market Betting on These Findings

Photo by Vy Vo via Unsplash.

None of these caveats seem to be slowing the market down. Euromonitor projects cannabis beverage sales will top $4 billion by 2028, a figure that reflects both consumer curiosity and aggressive positioning by brands eager to grab a slice of the space currently occupied by beer, wine, and spirits. That marketing has shifted noticeably in the past couple of years, moving away from generic get-high messaging and toward direct comparisons with alcohol -- drinks pitched as the thing you order instead of a beer at a bar, or bring to a party instead of a six-pack.

That pitch is happening even though most states still treat cannabis beverages far more restrictively than alcohol when it comes to where they can be sold. You won't find THC seltzers on a typical grocery store shelf the way you'd find a six-pack of beer in most places, and distribution still runs almost entirely through licensed dispensaries in states with legal cannabis programs. That mismatch between growing consumer interest and narrow retail access is one of the bigger tensions the industry is working through right now.

Studies like these two give brands a new vocabulary for that pitch -- harm reduction, better sleep, lower stress -- language that sounds clinical and reassuring. But it's worth remembering that no federal health agency, state regulator, or major medical body has endorsed cannabis beverages as an alcohol-reduction strategy. The industry is running well ahead of the science, and the science, while promising, is still just getting started.

The alcohol-substitution story is compelling but still early -- self-reported surveys, not clinical trials, and one study came from brands with skin in the game. That doesn't make the pattern meaningless. Two independent research efforts, using different methods and different populations, landed on a similar signal: people reaching for a cannabis beverage instead of a drink report real changes in how much they drink and how they feel the next day. That's worth taking seriously.

But taking it seriously means waiting for the kind of research that can actually isolate cause from correlation -- randomized trials, objective measures of sleep and drinking, samples that don't come pre-filtered through dispensary counters or sponsor rosters. Until then, this is a promising early signal wrapped in a marketing opportunity, and consumers curious about it should treat the health claims with the same skepticism they'd apply to any other self-reported wellness trend, cannabis-related or not.