Barry Schultz/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
For the Friday afternoon files: new research has discovered that regular marijuana users have sex more regularly than their non-toking counterparts.
The study, from Stanford University's School of Medicine, found that (heterosexual) folks who smoked marijuana daily had roughly 20 percent more sex than non-marijuana users. "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," said senior study author Michael Eisenberg, an assistant professor of urology at Stanford.
The data Eisenberg and his team used comes from a large Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of Americans age 15-49. Answers from around 28,000 women and 23,000 men were considered for their study, which was published online today in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Women who smoked pot daily had sex with a male partner 7.1 times per month, compared to 6 times per month for women who didn't smoke pot, according to the new study. Male pot users reported an average 6.9 sexual encounters with women per month, compared to 5.6 times per month for men who don't smoke pot.
While the findings don't necessarily show that marijuana use causes an increase in sex drive, they counter a longstanding idea that smoking pot will depress sexual desire or ability.
"Frequent marijuana use doesn't seem to impair sexual motivation or performance," said Eisenberg. "If anything, it's associated with increased coital frequency."
Researchers found the frequency of sex rose steadily with the frequency of marijuana use. This trend held even when researchers accounted for other drug use by participants.
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