STANFORD, Calif. — Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? A new study may give stoners an extra reason to justify their habit after finding that people who smoke pot regularly have more sex.
Researchers at Stanford looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on over 50,000 Americans, aged 25 to 45, which contained info on both a given individual’s sexual habits and marijuana intake.
Pot use was examined over a year-long period, while frequency of intercourse was examined over the span of four weeks.
Regardless of gender, pot use was found to be positively correlated with rate of intercourse, the researchers found.
Women who reported refraining from marijuana use, for example, reported having sex six times on average during the period examined, while those who smoked daily had sex 7.1 times.
For men, these figures came out to 5.6 and 6.9 bouts of intercourse, respectively.
Translated into percentage terms, pot users have sex 20 percent more than those who refrain from using cannabis, the researchers say.
Surprisingly, not much research has looked into a possible correlation between marijuana use and sexual frequency, despite a long-held popular belief that the former leads to the latter.
“Marijuana use is very common, but its large-scale use and association with sexual frequency hasn’t been studied much in a scientific way,” explains Michael Eisenberg, the study’s senior author, in a university news release. “Frequent marijuana use doesn’t seem to impair sexual motivation or performance. If anything, it’s associated with increased coital frequency.”
Eisenberg says that his team’s findings were independent of any other variables, such as demographics, health, marital status, or parental status.
In addition, the researchers controlled for the use of other substances, such as cocaine and alcohol.
While it may appear that the relationship between pot and sex is causal, Eisenberg argues that other factors may be at play.
Pot users, for instance, may simply have fewer inhibitions.
In other words, it’s not as simple as “say[ing] if you smoke more marijuana, you’ll have more sex,” Eisenberg concludes.
The full study was published in the November 2017 edition of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.