The CYC provides participants with objective personalized feedback about their Cannabis use in a non-judgemental fashion. Participants of the website appeared to be frequent Cannabis users with moderate severity risk associated with their Cannabis use. One clear result from this study is the benefit of linking the screener to an already established website (What’s With Weed). The standalone version was not advertised and was rarely used. In contrast, the What’s With Weed version was used roughly ten times as often. In addition, linking to the What’s With Weed site allowed targeting of the most relevant population – young Canadians (as only Canadian comparison data was available at the time of this study).

In designing the CYC screener, we were cognizant of the need for brevity as many users of the Internet tend to skip quickly from one page to another [17]. The CYC screener also took advantage of the availability of excellent population normative data that is available for use in Canada [14] and is also profiting from the availability of large, high quality data sets in the USA [15]. As normative data is added to the CYC from other countries it will be a challenge to find sufficiently large general population data sets that will allow the generation of accurate population summary data, separately for males and females, and for different age groups. In addition, the development of screeners, such as the ASSIST, by the World Health Organization has allowed for the inclusion of a brief, research-validated assessment that is relevant for participants in many different cultural settings [13].

Personalized feedback screeners, as well as other Internet-based interventions, have the goal of increasing the accessibility of services for those with addictions and other health concerns. Access to the Internet is widespread [18] and many people turn to the Internet for health information [19]. Many people with addictions concerns are unwilling or unable to access treatment and often cite reasons such as stigma or embarrassment, or the desire to deal with the problem on their own, as reasons for not seeking treatment [20, 21]. There is some evidence that Internet-based interventions are able to provide help to those traditionally underserved by face-to-face addictions treatment services [22]. The challenge then, is to continue to expand the range and accessibility of these online services in order to provide help to more people in need.

Future directions for the Check Your Cannabis screener will be to address some of the clear limitations of this preliminary report. Primarily, research is needed to develop an evidence base regarding any impact on Cannabis use from taking the screener and to establish the reliability of the self-report data on this website. In addition, population comparison data will be added for more countries in order to make this globally accessible tool more relevant to all potential participants.