Marijuana has been a very polemic subject around the world for a long time. This debatable drug makes people take opposite, different and far sides. Today, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine informed the results of their most recent study. According to them, people who consume cannabis have a higher average number of sexual relationships per months than others who don’t consume the substance at all.
The researchers used data gathered in 2002 and 2006 to 2015 from all kinds of people registered in the National Survey of Family Growth — a nationally representative CDC survey of US citizens ages 15 to 49.
According to the study published Friday in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, scientists obtained and analyzed information from around 28,000 women and 23,000 men.
Impressively, after many previous beliefs about cannabis causing erectile dissemination to men — probably because people relate marihuana’s effects to cigarettes’ —, or sexual abstinence on women, the Stanford University researchers suggested something far from this.
All kinds of marijuana consumers
From all the participants, 24.5 percent of men and 14.5 percent of women accepted having consumed cannabis in the previous year, month or day. When scientists compared data from consumers and non-consumers, they discovered that the first group had more sex than the second one.
Regarding numbers: women who admitted to having consumed marijuana daily also had sex an average of 7.1 times per month — compared to those non-smoker women who had sex around 6 times per month.
Men, on the other side, seemed to have sex fewer times than women. The cannabis-smokers reported having sex 6.9 times per month, while those who didn’t consume the drug had 5.6 times per month.
To be balanced, the researchers used data from people with different living-status. This factor sometimes affects the number of sex people have and the amount of marijuana they consume per month.
“The overall trend we saw applied to people of both sexes and all races, ages, education levels, income groups and religions, every health status, whether they were married or single and whether they had kids,” author Michael Eisenberg said in a statement.
The researchers informed that this doesn’t mean marihuana is strictly related to better and more frequent sexual encounters. According to Eisenberg, the study doesn’t say that “if you smoke more marijuana, you’ll have more sex.” However, they saw — as they call it — a “dose-dependent relationship” between sex and marijuana.
Dose-dependent relationship means that people who increased their marijuana consumption also accordingly increased the number of times they had sexual encounters per four weeks.
Although this is the first study of its kind ever made by scientists, there are other previous studies about cannabis consume.
Sex is essential in people’s lives
In 2016, research suggested that people actually preferred having sex while being stoned than while being drunk. Also, a 2003 study informed that more than a half of people analyzed said that marijuana was a libido-booster, compared to the 26 percent left who said the drug inhibited their sex drive.
“In humans, sex is not only a means to procreation but serves as an important source of physical pleasure and expression of emotional intimacy,” the Stanford authors wrote on the study.
There are also other studies referring to the benefits of having sex only, without mentioning whether the person is under a drug’s effect or not.
Sex itself makes people happier, according to researchers across the world. People who tend to have sex on a daily basis are not just happier, but less stressed. Also, they have lower blood pressure, and better cardiovascular health overall.
Of course, we already know that everything associated with cannabis is not a benefit. Many consumers have developed a dependency to the drug, affected their skills while driving, and decreased their academic performances. But studies referring to what’s good when talking about weed are not pretty common.
The dark side of the cannabis-moon
Most studies performed these last decades focused on showing the public why consuming marijuana was wrong. Like most drugs, cannabis side-effects tend to pose severe damages to one’s health. That’s something people should be careful when consuming any sort of substances. Some of them have even led people to death.
Also, the majority of institutions related to drugs directly refers them as bad. That’s why there’s a National Institute on Drug Abuse instead of a National Institute on Drug Use.
However, the world is starting to make more research on the “acceptable” side of marijuana effects.
There are proofs that cannabis also makes people to feel euphoria, relaxation and pain relief, to decrease the rates of opiate dependence and domestic violence, and to lower the use of more harmful drugs.
Today, we know that marijuana is also related to a better sexual life.
Source: The Journal of Sexual Medicine