Weed And Sex – What’s the Real Connection
People have always tried to find a way to increase sexual pleasure – be it with their partner or without them. That’s one of the reasons why sex toys have become so popular. As statistics show, around 50% of men in the US have used one at some point in their life. The number is slightly higher when it comes to women, reaching around 65%.
As such, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the journey to finding other things that can make sex better and the pleasure more intense continues. One of the recent studies suggested that weed can be one of the solutions.
However, what is the truth? Can weed really affect one’s sex life? That’s what we’re about to look at in this article. So, keep on reading if you want to find out more.
What Does the Research Say
As experts from greenbudguru.com say, the relationship between sex and cannabis is complicated. Although weed has a long history of being used to enhance sexual experiences, scientists still struggle to answer one of the most important questions in this department – Is cannabis an aphrodisiac?
There are several reasons why this question is hard to answer. First of all, marijuana is still classified by the FDA as a Schedule I drug, which makes any research involving it very hard to perform. Availability is not the problem, as you can find it in dispensaries all over the United States. It’s the necessary permits that cause the issue because they are quite hard to obtain due to cannabis’s classification.
Secondly, sexual arousal and functioning are already complicated on their own, which means that analyzing the effect of any substance on them has more than one layer. As Jordan Tishler, medical cannabis expert from InhaleMD, says, “A lot of the understanding that needs to go into a discussion around cannabis and sexuality has less to do with cannabis and more to do with sexuality.”
When it comes to sexual enjoyment, there are plenty of factors that researchers can take into account – there’s the biological aspect, social, psychological, etc. They all play a part in attraction, orgasm, arousal, and just overall satisfaction from the intercourse. Besides, even if all of these are considered, we cannot forget that good sex means something different for each person – or even the same person, just on a different day.
All this makes the study of the connection between cannabis and sexual pleasure even more challenging. However, it doesn’t mean that any research hasn’t been done – because there has. Although limited, it does shed some light on this particular relation. What exactly does it say? Let’s take a look.
Most Research Is Based on Self-Reported Surveys
As we already mentioned, marijuana is considered to be a Schedule I drug – in order to use the actual compounds derived from cannabis, a researcher would have to obtain a specific drug license, which is extremely hard to achieve. That’s why in most cases, researchers use self-reported surveys.
What exactly does it mean? Well, to put it as simply as possible, the participants are asked about their use of cannabis as well as their sexual experience. Unfortunately, a study performed this way has several drawbacks.
Why Are Self-Reported Surveys Not a Good Research Method
First of all, when using self-reported surveys, researchers are entrusting the participants that they honestly and accurately state how much of a substance they had consumed, as well as how it affected their sex life. What’s more, there’s no way of confirming whether what they said is true.
Also, researchers cannot test the people participating in the study to see what exactly it is that they consumed – as you probably know, cannabis not only can have different levels of THC, but also there are several ways to introduce it into your system. Was it a product high in THC? Was it an edible? Was it a concentrate? – There’s no way of knowing, aside from what the participants say.
Last but not least, although these studies can confirm whether there is some kind of relation between sex and marijuana, they cannot explain the mechanism behind such correlation, nor can they explain why such a relationship even exists.
Previous Studies and What They Said
As we already mentioned, there had already been some studies that took a closer look at the relation between marijuana use and sex. We decided to list some of them to show you what was discovered up to this point.
Marijuana Use and Sexual Behaviour
The study was published in the Journal of Sex Research in 1984. The researchers – Ronald Weller and James Halikas – interviewed the participants, all of whom were white college students, with 62% being male. As it was written in the report, “Over two-thirds reported increased sexual pleasure and satisfaction with marijuana. Increased desire for a familiar sexual partner was reported by about one-half.”
Association Between Marijuana Use and Sexual Frequency in the United States: A Population-Based Study
The “Association Between Marijuana Use and Sexual Frequency in the United States: A Population-Based Study” is a more recent one, published in 2017 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. The study used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, and instead of asking the participants directly, the researchers correlated their self-reported frequency of cannabis use with their frequency of having sex.
What they found was that those who reported consuming weed daily, weekly, or monthly reported having slightly more sex than those who had never smoked. For example, women who declared everyday cannabis use had an average of 7.1 sexual encounters in the four weeks preceding the survey, while those who had never smoked had 6.
To be precise, here is what was written in the results section of the study’s abstract. “After adjustment, female monthly, weekly, and daily marijuana users had significantly higher sexual frequency compared with never users. Male weekly and daily users had significantly higher sexual frequency compared with never users. An overall trend for men and women was identified, showing that higher marijuana use was associated with increased coital frequency.”
The Relationship between Marijuana Use Prior to Sex and Sexual Function in Women
Here’s another recent study, which was performed between 2016 and 2017 and published in Sexual Medicine. Among 373 participants of the study, all of which were women, 176 reported using cannabis – around half of them reported frequent use (between once a week and several times a day), while the other half reported infrequent use (from once a year to a few times a year). 127 from the 176 cannabis users declared that they used marijuana before sex.
The study had a few major findings. First of all, those women who reported using marijuana before sex were more likely to report having a satisfactory orgasm than those who didn’t – what’s more, the difference could also be seen between those who reported frequent and infrequent use.
Here is a precise extract from the abstract. “Most women reported increases in sex drive, improvement in orgasm, decrease in pain, but no change in lubrication. After adjusting for race, women who reported marijuana use before sexual activity had 2.13 higher odds of reporting satisfactory orgasms than women who reported no marijuana use. After adjusting for race and age, women with frequent marijuana use, regardless of use before sex or not, had 2.10 times higher odds of reporting satisfactory orgasms than those with infrequent marijuana use.”
This study is especially important as it was the first one that focused directly on the experience from a female perspective.
The Bottom Line
Cannabis is a substance that is still quite a mystery for most. Of course, there are some speculations about what it can and cannot do – nothing surprising there. However, in most cases, research is too limited and doesn’t fully confirm the properties of cannabis.
This exact situation is happening when it comes to the relationship between cannabis and sex. Although there are some speculations, and the research that has already been done seems to confirm them, we still don’t know enough to be 100% sure – and the legal situation of cannabis definitely doesn’t help.
For now, we can say that there is a correlation between consuming marijuana and having a more pleasurable sexual experience. However, how does it work, and why that even happens – that’s something we still need to discover.
© Oliwia Zawadzka