Politics
More States Consider Adding Female Orgasm Disorder As A Medical Marijuana Qualifying Condition
As part of an ongoing push to allow access to medical marijuana as a treatment for female orgasmic disorder (FOD), advocates have filed petitions in half a dozen more states—including Oregon, Colorado, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Arkansas—to officially list FOD as a qualifying condition.
The efforts follow separate petitions to add FOD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana in Ohio, Connecticut, Illinois and New Mexico. The Connecticut proposal has already been formally adopted, while the Illinois move is still pending following preliminary approval. Ohio officials rejected a similar petition, and a New Mexico panel, meanwhile, is scheduled to hold a meeting on the issue in October.
Earlier this month, Oregon officials told the petitioner in that state, Rebecca Andersson, that they’d formally accepted her request to consider the matter and would be issuing a decision on adding FOD as a qualifying condition within 180 days.
Supporters of adding FOD as an approved condition—defined as a persistent or recurrent delay or absence of orgasm despite sexual stimulation—say cannabis has been transformational, offering heightened sexual sensitivity, improving feelings of intimacy and allowing them to achieve orgasm.
In Oregon, for example, Andersson told Marijuana Moment that she initially “dabbled” in marijuana after it became legal for adults in the state nearly a decade ago. Then, after a cervical cancer diagnosis, treatment and a subsequent surgery, she rethought her relationship with the substance.
“I had already noticed that cannabis was helping me connect with my husband and have more sensation and more pleasure,” Andersson said. “And so then, after I got sick and needed to kind of rediscover how my body functions, I became even more intentional about incorporating cannabis into our sex life, including experimenting with homemade cannabis-infused lubricants and suppositories that provide more localized effects.”
Before long, she was raving to friends about what a difference adding cannabis to her sex life seemed to have made.
“For me personally, it was really revolutionary. It made a huge difference, both in physical sensation but also kind of my headspace,” she said in an interview.
“It changes your perception of time, as well,” she added. “That’s really helpful. I think sometimes you feel pressure if you’re not climaxing fast enough or if it’s not, like, working, you know? So there were just a lot of different things that were really enhancing my experience and making it more pleasurable.”
By pushing to add FOD as a qualifying condition in Oregon, Andersson hopes to empower others to experience the same transformation.
“I’ve had some amazing results where, you know, I feel like my orgasms are like these 20-minute-long, like, rolling orgasms that I just keep coming and coming and coming,” she said.
It’s more than anecdotal evidence supporting cannabinoids as part of treatment of FOD, however. Undergirding arguments by petitioners in states across the country is a growing body of research showing that cannabis can help improve orgasm ease, frequency and satisfaction in people with FOD.
Clinical sexologist Suzanne Mulvehill is one of the researchers leading a sort of renaissance in the use of cannabis to treat FOD, a movement she says goes back decades to researchers like sociologist Erich Goode in the 1970s.
In a recent survey of sexually active women who used cannabis, Mulvehill found that more than 7 in 10 of those who experienced challenges in achieving orgasm reported that cannabis use increased their orgasm ease (71 percent) and frequency (72.9 percent). Two-thirds (67 percent) said it improved orgasm satisfaction.
Mulvehill, who’s helped Andersson and women in other states file paperwork to begin the process of adding FOD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana, said that officially recognizing the legitimate use of cannabis to help treat orgasm difficulty helps normalize not only medical marijuana but also open discussion and prioritization of the female orgasm.
“Public policy is actually a representation of what society accepts,” she told Marijuana Moment in a recent interview.
“So when we have a public policy that says, ‘Yes, we are recognizing female orgasm difficulty’—one, as a condition and, two, as being treatable with medical cannabis—it’s significant,” Mulvehill said.
In Colorado, the woman behind the petition to add FOD as a qualifying condition is Amanda Moser, a sexologist whose own practice includes a focus on cannabis. She submitted the request in June. Moser also recently published a study indicating that cannabis can help people, especially women, experience more and better orgasms—work that put her in touch with Mulvehill.
“It was an exciting opportunity to get to know her,” Moser told Marijuana Moment, “because I was able to see how my research could be applied.”
The general public typically doesn’t have access to scholarly journals, she pointed out, and so applying research findings to a public policy shift like adding FOD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana felt like a way “to actually be able to apply my research to something practical.”
One key finding of Moser’s research was that cannabis could help close the “orgasm inequality gap.”
“Males will usually always have an orgasm during sex, whereas females honestly rarely have an orgasm during sex,” she explained. “It’s like less than a third of the time.”
Andersson, in Oregon, says that’s another reason making marijuana more widely accessible to people with FOD is crucial.
“I feel very strongly that women—because there is this orgasm gap—that women need to be encouraged or supported in overcoming that shame,” she said, “so that they can access this pleasure that is available to all of us.”
Nan Wise, a psychotherapist, sex therapist and neuroscience researcher in New Jersey, submitted the petition to add FOD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana in that state.
“Because so many women suffer from FOD (and the ability to experience orgasm is a key ingredient to a happy healthy sex life for most people) and there are no truly effective pharmacological treatments for orgasm difficulties, I am a huge fan of medical marijuana as a safe and highly effective treatment,” she told Marijuana Moment. “It works.”
She said marijuana may influence sexual functioning through a variety of mechanisms, including the endocannabinoid system’s influence on arousal and pleasure, the reduction of anxiety or inhibition, enhanced sensory perception, general mood enhancement, increased dopamine levels and/or pain reduction.
“Although I don’t have orgasm disorder, the use of small amounts of marijuana improves orgasm quality and helps me get in touch with my sexual desire. That is a huge plus!” Wise wrote in an email. “I do believe that ultimately promoting the idea of medical marijuana as a treatment for female sexual challenges goes a long way in legitimizing sexual pleasures as a priority for women.”
The women offered some advice to people who might be inclined to self-medicate with marijuana to help induce orgasm. First: Be sure to communicate with your healthcare provider about any new substances you plan to introduce, as well as about the underlying condition. Also: Start with a low dose and increase it only slowly, as too much cannabis could be counterproductive.
“It’s been my experience that the dosage necessary for women to have a good orgasmic response is far lower than the typical recreational amount,” Wise said. “A little goes a long way.
Moser also pointed out that nearly all cannabis lubricants on the market today are oil-based, meaning combining them with condoms is a no-no.
As for how marijuana might benefit people with FOD, the research by Mulvehill and Jordan Tishler—a doctor at the Association of Cannabinoid Specialists and the company inhaleMD—identifies a few possible theories.
Among them is dishabituation theory, the idea that cannabis “lessens the routine of habits, such as cognitive distraction, a known FOD cause.”
Neuroplasticity theory, meanwhile, “proposes that some women learn to orgasm while using cannabis, as seen in comments in this study and anecdotally.”
“Cannabis and endocannabinoids, the cannabinoids created by the human body, are increasingly recognized for their roles in neural development processes, including brain cell growth and neuroplasticity,” the study says.
A separate 2020 study in the journal Sexual Medicine also found that women who used cannabis more often had better sex, though there’s growing evidence that marijuana can improve sexual function regardless of sex or gender.
Numerous online surveys have also reported positive associations between marijuana and sex. One study even found a connection between the passage of marijuana laws and increased sexual activity.
Yet another study, however, cautions that more marijuana doesn’t necessarily mean better sex. A literature review published in 2019 found that cannabis’s impact on libido may depend on dosage, with lower amounts of THC correlating with the highest levels of arousal and satisfaction. Most studies showed that marijuana has a positive effect on women’s sexual function, the study found, but too much THC can actually backfire.
“Several studies have evaluated the effects of marijuana on libido, and it seems that changes in desire may be dose dependent,” the review’s authors wrote. “Studies support that lower doses improve desire but higher doses either lower desire or do not affect desire at all.”
Part of what cannabis appears to do to improve orgasms is interact with and disrupt the brain’s default mode network, Tishler, Mulvehill’s co-author, told Marijuana Moment in an interview earlier this year.
“For many of these women, who cannot or do not have an orgasm, there’s some complex interplay between the frontal lobe—which is kind of the ‘should have, would have, could have [part of the brain]’—and then the limbic system, which is the ’emotional, fear, bad memories, anger,’ those sorts of things,” he said. “That’s all moderated through the default mode network.”
Modulating the default mode network is also central to many psychedelic-assisted therapies. And some research has indicated that those substances, too, may improve sexual pleasure and function.
A paper earlier this year in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, which purported to be the first scientific study to formally explore the effects of psychedelics on sexual functioning, found that drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD could have beneficial effects on sexual functioning even months after use.
“On the surface, this type of research may seem ‘quirky,’” one of the authors of that study said, “but the psychological aspects of sexual function—including how we think about our own bodies, our attraction to our partners, and our ability to connect to people intimately—are all important to psychological wellbeing in sexually active adults.”
