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According to a recent study, women who use marijuana before sex are more than twice as likely to have “satisfactory orgasms.” Interestingly, women who regularly use cannabis have a similar rate of enjoyable orgasms even if they don’t use cannabis right before sex, which seems to indicate that frequent use has a positive, long-term effect on female libido. So, ladies, if you want better sex, start using marijuana… right? It may not be so simple.
Throughout the years, countless studies have found that marijuana increases sexual pleasure, while others found that it lowers it; research found that it increases libido, while other research determined that it causes erectile dysfunction. So, which is it? As psychologist Justin Lehmiller put it in a 2015 article in Playboy, “We need a lot more hard data (pun fully intended) to understand why different [people] report experiencing different effects” while under the influence.
The lack of a controlled environment, varying doses and personal resistance to the drug are probably causing the inconsistencies in the data, but there is no other possible outcome right now in the U.S., because cannabis remains a “controlled substance.”
Most studies only use self-reporting from patients who claim to have used cannabis in the past, so the researchers never get to actually observe the effects in a controlled environment, use placebo or lead blind studies. This problem is not limited to sexual prowess while high; it is impossible to fully understand a substance if researchers cannot freely study it, and cannabis cannot currently be freely studied in this country.
A Lack of Competent Studies
Important research is being repressed in the U.S. along with cannabis availability. As cannabis is still illegal in most of the country, it cannot be given by researchers to test subjects for observation, and most studies solely rely on the subjects’ memories of their experiences with cannabis—the study mentioned above about female orgasms in one of those. This is a problem that both the pro- and anti-cannabis sides need to address.
If cannabis actually has useful, provable medical uses, everyone loses out by keeping it illegal, but if cannabis doesn’t have medical properties (as opponents to its legalization claim), they would need competent studies to prove it and keep the substance illegal. Repressing scientific research cannot be spun in a positive light. Yet, marijuana is kept as a “Schedule I” drug as a political maneuver, which severely limits the scientific community’s ability to study it.
In order to study cannabis nowadays, researchers need approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) before being allowed clinical trials, which is an exceedingly hard and slow process. This forces a majority of those conducting cannabis-related studies to use less than scientific methods for lack of a better option. Additionally, there is only one federally approved supplier of marijuana in the entire country, the University of Mississippi, which provides licensed researchers with a strain of cannabis which is reportedly much less potent than what the general public consumes, as federal regulations demand that its tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels be artificially kept low.
Hopefully, as cannabis is increasingly becoming legal, we may witness a boom in cannabis-related research, and therefore we might finally come to know if cannabis use really does affect sexual functions as well as many other aspects of our lives. The DEA announced in 2016 that it would allow other growers to cultivate marijuana for research, although we have yet to see any improvement on that front.
