- People have often claimed that marijuana usage is linked to impotency. But that may not be true.
- New research suggests people who smoke marijuana daily actually have more sex.
- More research is obviously needed, but this is a good step in the right direction to making people more informed about their health.
For years, marijuana has been linked with lethargy and even impotence, with people claiming that regular marijuana users may have a more difficult time having sex.
But a new study claimed that not only does the average person who smokes marijuana regularly have a healthy amount of sex, they actually may have more sex than the average person who does not.
Michael Eisenberg, an assistant professor of urology at Stanford University, told CNN that he saw a lot of patients who were struggling with impotency, and they often asked him if they should smoke less marijuana. Eisenberg heard this so often that he decided to do some research himself to see if the claim held up.
He looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which asked about 28,000 people who identified as women and nearly 23,000 people who identified as men about their drug use and sexual habits.
Eisenberg told CNN that the results he found surprised him: Both sets of people who smoked marijuana in the four weeks before the survey had sex more often than those who didn't. Women who didn't smoke marijuana said they had sex six times on average; those who used marijuana daily had sex 7.1 times on average. Men who didn't smoke had sex 5.6 times; those who smoked daily had sex 6.9 times on average.
There are certainly limitations to this study, as Joseph Palamar, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at New York University, told CNN. To truly find if marijuana depletes sex drive, researchers would want to do a larger study in which people smoke hours before having sex.
Either way, knowledge is power and it's important to study these types of things.
A majority of Americans have said they've smoked marijuana at least once. The more they know about how the drug affects their bodies, the better.
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