To estimate disability weights, a lay person description of cannabis dependence was formulated by the Expert Group as one of 222 lay descriptions that reflected the 291 diseases and their sequelae in GBD 2010. Full details of this process have been reported in Text S1 and elsewhere [36,48]. The survey was completed by community samples in five countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Peru, the United Republic of Tanzania and the United States of America) and by respondents to an open-access internet survey. In both, a pair-wise comparison method, asking respondents to nominate the healthier of a pair of health states, was used to arrive at an estimate of the level of disability for each GBD health state.
