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Company news · July 2025
Clear30 partners with MusiCares on cannabis, creativity and mental health
A resource for the music community, built with the organization that has supported it for thirty-five years.
Dr. Fred Muench presenting Understanding Cannabis as part of the MusiCares mental health and addiction recovery series.
Clear30 has partnered with MusiCares to give the music community something it has not had: a clear, research-based resource on cannabis, creativity and mental health, and a path to support for people who want to change their use.
MusiCares is the health and human services arm of the Recording Academy, and its mental health and addiction recovery program is one of the few places working musicians can turn without cost or stigma. Its team had been hearing the same question often enough to act on it. Artists were not asking about alcohol or opioids. They were asking about weed.
The question is rarely whether cannabis is harmful in the abstract. It is more specific and more difficult than that: is this helping me make things, or has it started getting in the way? For a working musician, that is not an idle question. It touches how they write, how they perform, how they sleep between shows, and how they hold up on tour.
No other art form is as entwined with cannabis as music, and almost nobody gives musicians a straight answer about it.
Clear30 saw the same pattern from a different angle. Cannabis is now the substance people in the app are most likely to say they want to change, and the reasons they give have shifted. They are not describing rock bottom. They are describing a slow loss of edge: sleep that no longer restores, motivation that has thinned out, a sense that the work is not what it was. Nationally the picture matches, with more daily cannabis users than daily drinkers for the first time and products several times stronger than what most people started on.
So the two organizations built the resource together. Understanding Cannabis, presented by Clear30 co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Fred Muench and introduced by MusiCares Managing Director of Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Marsha Iverson, works through what the research actually shows about cannabis and creative performance, what today's potency changes, how cannabis interacts with sleep and mood, and what to expect if you decide to take a break.
“Musicians are told cannabis is part of the craft, and they are told it is a problem, and neither one helps them decide anything. What they deserve is the evidence and then their own judgment about whether it is still working for them.”
Dr. Fred Muench, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Clear30
Muench is an addiction scientist who spent years touring as a singer, and who is open about his own recovery. That combination is most of why the session works. The evidence he presents is not comfortable for anyone attached to the idea that weed makes them better at their work, but it is delivered by someone who has been in the van.
The partnership does not end at the recording. Clear30 released free access codes for MusiCares attendees along with a worksheet written for this audience, How is weed affecting your music?, which can be used on its own or alongside the app. Both remain available through MusiCares, and the session is now part of its standing mental health and addiction recovery library rather than a one-time event.
Access has been a running commitment on the Clear30 side. The company has granted more than 1,600 scholarships to people who could not otherwise afford the app, including a round for members of the music community affected by the California wildfires.