Want More Sex? Marijuana Smokers Get Lucky More Often
The combination of sex and drugs has provided inspiration for rock songs, countless experiential essays and now a study that says stoners may have better sex lives.
Michael Eisenberg, urologist at Stanford University and co-author of the paper just published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, first became interested in the connection after looking for answers to his patients' sexual health concerns.
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"As we examine health and lifestyle related factors that may impact sexual function, marijuana has come up more and more frequently," he told Newsweek via email. "As I looked in the literature, there was not a lot of data available."
Closing the gap, Eisenberg analyzed information collected from a national survey that took place between 2002 and 2015 of more than 51,000 Americans (28,176 women and 22,943 men). Participants ranged from 25-45 years old, but were nearly 30 on average, and answered questions about their personal lives—including ones on sex and drug use. People opened up about how frequently they smoked weed in the past year as well as how often they got lucky.
It appears stoners get more love. Women who didn't smoke weed only had sex six times in a month, while daily pot smokers reported seven encounters in the same time period. The same was true for men: nonsmokers engaged in 5.6 bouts of sex while stoners claimed to be more active with 6.9 sessions. And the doctor found that nearly every type of pot smoker enjoyed more frequent sex.
"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 or not they had kids," he said in a statement.
However, it seems that married people spend slighlty less time in the bedroom than those who don't live with partners, although Eisenberg isn't sure why.
"There certainly may be a personality issue," he says of a possible explanation. A study from earlier this year revealed that married couples have less sex now than they did 14 years ago.
This is the first study looking at sexual frequency and weed, but previous research has studied whether drug dosages can impact how bountiful our sex lives are (or aren't). Smaller doses can cause arousal but too much can have the opposite effect. Research from NYU last year compared intercourse while drinking or getting high and found both lead to unprotected sex and riskier behavior.
Before you smoke a bowl to get it up, Eisenberg says it's better to hold off on using weed as an aphrodisiac. The paucity of data on sex and drugs means there's still no telling how it could impact your love life.
