Lead photo via Flickr user Neto Baldo
A new study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine is giving stoners reason to celebrate.
According to CNN, after hearing persistent rumors about marijuana use negatively affecting performance in the bedroom, Dr. Michael Eisenberg, an associate professor of urology at the Stanford University Medical Center, decided to test his patients’ hypothesis and ended up with a rather encouraging result.
"Usually, people assume the more frequently you smoke, the worse it could be when it came to sex, but in fact, we learned the opposite was true," Eisenberg told CNN.
Bucking the fake news about stoners being lazy lovers, Eisenberg took a deep dive into the latest National Survey on Family Growth, a recurring government survey that looks at a huge range of social topics, including both recreational drug use and sexual proclivities.
Correlating frequency of cannabis consumption and sexual experience, Eisenberg found that women who never used cannabis had sex an average of 6 times in a four week period, while women who got stoned everyday reported an average of 7.1 intimate encounters in the same time frame.
In men, that same trend was similar, and in fact, slightly more intensified. While men that didn’t partake in the devil’s lettuce had sex 5.6 times in a four week period, their stoner peers got laid 6.9 times over the same month.
"We were surprised to see the positive association between users," Eisenberg said to CNN. "This was across the board: marital status, race, none of that mattered."
But while it is pretty clear that stoners are getting busy more than those practicing cannabis abstinence, Eisenberg’s study still has a few glaring holes, with no data to actually connect the amount of sex someone has with their marijuana use, or vise versa.
For Joseph Palamar, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at New York University, who has done his own clinical research on marijuana and sex, but was not involved in the most recent study, a lack of research and huge variance in marijuana’s effects has made making any concrete scientific claims near-impossible.
"It can have a different impact on different people," Palamar told CNN, adding, "It's unclear from [Eisenberg’s] data if people had marijuana in their system before or during sex.”
Even with those still-unanswered questions standing in the way of a perfect theory, Eisenberg says the results of the study have certainly changed his own view on marijuana’s role in the bedroom, telling CNN that he will now change his tune when patients ask if their love for the green is standing in the way of their love life.
"It may not be the culprit."
You heard the doctor — so smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, and always be safe, but please don’t blame your poor performance on pot.
