Engaging Young Adults in Cannabis Interventions: Data, Design, and Novel Engagement Strategies

The REACH Lab at Stanford Medicine, directed by Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, studies adolescent and young adult substance use and builds prevention curricula used by schools across the country. Each year it runs the Teaching Cannabis (and other drugs!) Awareness & Prevention Conference for educators, clinicians, prevention staff and researchers. Clear30 was invited to present at the seventh.

Dr. Fred Muench, Clear30’s Co-Founder and CSO, and co-founder and CEO Asher Herbstman led the session. Muench is a clinical psychologist who has spent his career on digital behavior change and previously ran Partnership to End Addiction. Herbstman leads engagement, which in practice means bringing the voice of the audience into the product itself.

The premise of the workshop was a gap the prevention field knows well. Daily cannabis use among 18 to 25 year olds is higher than in any other age group and still climbing, perceived harm has fallen sharply over thirty years, and only a small fraction of people with cannabis use disorder ever reach treatment. The most common reason young adults give for not seeking care is not stigma or cost. It is that they do not think they need it.

That makes the usual tools ineffective. A referral assumes someone is looking for treatment. A warning assumes they have not already weighed the trade-off themselves. Most of the young adults Clear30 reaches have been using daily for years, have tried to stop before, and are not waiting to be told cannabis carries risk.

Clear30 is the largest cannabis behavior-change app in the world by daily installs, with more than 150,000 downloads and over 40 million views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Everything in the session came out of that: engagement data on the posts themselves, sentiment analysis of the comment sections, and conversion results tracked from a view through to a download and beyond.

Alongside the social data sit hundreds of A/B tests inside the app and thousands of peer conversations between users. Put together, it is an unusual body of evidence for this field, and it is quantitative rather than anecdotal: what a young adult responds to, what they ignore, and what keeps them engaged a month later.

The session walked through that pipeline end to end, from social content and creator partnerships through onboarding, retention and outcomes. Three findings ran through all of it.

The first was that warning this audience does not work. Fear-based messaging repels them, permission and non-judgment engage them, and a peer saying it converts at a far higher rate than a brand saying the same thing.

The second was that most people are not at either end of the spectrum. Asked how cannabis is affecting them, the large majority land somewhere in the middle: getting something real out of it, and looking for a way to control the trade rather than end it. Programs built on an abstinence-only premise are designed for a minority of the people who need them.

The third was that the language of self-determination outperforms the language of harm. Young adults describe wanting mental clarity, less anxiety, better self-control, and to stop feeling stuck in a loop. They rarely describe wanting to be safer. Meeting them in their own framing is the difference between a message that lands and one that gets scrolled past.