A New Mexico regulatory board has given preliminary approval to make female orgasm difficulty (FOD) a qualifying condition for the state’s medical marijuana program, voting 7–2 to recommend the change at a meeting on Monday.
The New Mexico Medical Cannabis Advisory Board’s vote does not immediately add FOD as a qualifying condition. A report with the board’s recommendation will next go to the secretary of health, who will review the proposal and consult with staff before either accepting, denying or modifying the recommendation.
That’s according to an email from the acting director of the New Mexico Department of Health’s Center for Medical Cannabis forwarded to Marijuana Moment by Suzanne Mulvehill, a clinical sexologist and researcher who’s helped lead the charge to add FOD as a qualifying condition in a number of states with legal cannabis.
Mulvehill told Marijuana Moment that she’s “very pleased” with the movement in New Mexico, noting that officials in Connecticut and Illinois have also taken steps to add FOD as qualifying conditions in those jurisdictions.
“FOD affects millions of women worldwide,” she added, “and there are no conventional treatments.”
Two additional states are currently considering adding FOD as a medical marijuana qualifying condition. Oregon held a virtual public meeting earlier this month and is accepting public comments through Friday. And in Arkansas, which held a public meeting about FOD last month, officials are taking comments until October 14.
Mulvehill noted that support for the New Mexico addition of FOD came from a growing network of researchers and advocates across the country and world. They include the woman who petitioned that FOD be added as a qualifying condition in Oregon, Rebecca Andersson—who told Marijuana Moment earlier this year that cannabis was “revolutionary” in helping her orgasm after a cancer diagnosis, treatment and a radical hysterectomy—as well as researchers in the United States and Europe.
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.
Mulvehill herself has published research with co-author Jordan Tishler—a doctor at the Association of Cannabinoid Specialists and the company inhaleMD—finding 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.
Tishler, too, commented in favor of New Mexico’s addition of FOD as a qualifying condition at Monday’s board meeting.
Mulvehill has also filed petitions herself in some states to add FOD as a qualifying condition, and she’s helped women in other states submit paperwork of their own to begin the process of adding FOD as a qualifying condition.
Past successes, she told Marijuana Moment, have helped build momentum for the cause. In June, for example, a board in Connecticut voted unanimously to approve FOD as a qualifying condition—a development that drew attention from people in other parts of the country, Mulvehill said.
The effort also looks promising in Illinois, where officials in March unanimously recommended FOD’s adoption as a qualifying condition. The move still requires agreement from a top official.
As more states consider the addition, Mulvehill has also expanded her advocacy and education efforts. She told Marijuana Moment she’s currently developing training programs to help therapists better incorporate cannabis as medicine and also plans to launch a podcast, called The Orgasm Hour, sometime later this year.
She’s also scheduled to present research on cannabis and female orgasms at the Society for Cannabis Clinicians conference on October 12. And Mulvehill and Tishler have a new forthcoming journal article that’s currently in the review process.
Among other research into marijuana and sexual health, a study last year in the Journal of Cannabis Research found that more than 70 percent of surveyed adults said cannabis before sex increased desire and improved orgasms, while 62.5 percent said cannabis enhanced pleasure while masturbating.
Because past findings indicated women who have sex with men are typically less likely to orgasm than their partners, authors of that study said cannabis “can potentially close the orgasm in equality gap.”
A 2020 study in the journal Sexual Medicine, meanwhile, found that women who used cannabis more often had better sex.
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 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.”
“That’s all moderated through the default mode network,” he said.
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.
Earlier this year, for example, a paper in the journal Nature Scientific Reports that purported to be the 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.”
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
A New Mexico regulatory board has given preliminary approval to make female orgasm difficulty (FOD) a qualifying condition for the state’s medical marijuana program, voting 7–2 to recommend the change at a meeting on Monday. The New Mexico Medical Cannabis Advisory Board’s vote does not immediately add FOD as a qualifying condition. A report with Read More