Three States Now Accepting Public Comment On Approving Medical Marijuana To Treat Female Orgasm Difficulty

Three U.S. states are poised to begin accepting public comments next month on whether to allow access to medical marijuana to treat female orgasm difficulty (FOD), a condition that some estimates say affects up to 4 in 10 women.

Oregon will hold a virtual public meeting on whether to add FOD—also sometimes called female orgasm disorder—as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana on Thursday, with public comments accepted for a week afterward, through October 11.

New Mexico will hold a virtual meeting to consider the addition on Monday, with public comments accepted anytime between now and then.

And in Arkansas, which already held a public meeting about FOD on September 11, officials are accepting public comment until October 14.

The efforts are part of a coordinated push to add FOD as a qualifying condition in multiple states where medical marijuana is legal.

“Every state has millions of women struggling with orgasm and dealing with the mental and physical affects of having FOD,” said Suzanne Mulvehill, a clinical sexologist and researcher who’s helped lead the charge to add FOD as a qualifying condition. She told Marijuana Moment that women with FOD “experience more mental health issues, take more prescription medication, and have more sexual abuse histories than women without FOD.”

Mulvehill said FOD can affect quality of life much like erectile dysfunction can, “yet men’s sexual health issues are taken seriously to the point that they have become normalized and with effective treatments, while women’s sexual health issues have remained stigmatized and shamed.”

“We are working to change that,” she added, “and one way is by US states recognizing FOD as a qualifying condition for medical cannabis.”

It’s more than anecdotal evidence supporting cannabinoids as part of treatment of FOD. Mulvehill and colleague Jordan Tishler, a doctor and cannabis specialist, have in recent years contributed to a growing body of research showing that cannabis can help improve orgasm ease, frequency and satisfaction in people with FOD.

In a recent survey of sexually active women who used cannabis, for example, Mulvehill and Tishler 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 has also filed petitions asking state officials to add FOD as a qualifying condition for marijuana, and she’s helped women in a handful of states file 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.

“Connecticut’s official approval in June validated our mission,” she wrote in an email. “The day after CT was approved, I received an email titled, ‘Help!’ from a 76 year old woman who has been married for 56 years and had not orgasmed for more than 30 years.”

“The problem is real and we are helping women,” the researcher said. “That is what gives me hope. We are breaking cultural barriers with public policy.”

The effort also looks promising in Illinois, where officials in March unanimously recommended FOD’s adoption as a qualifying condition. However the move still requires agreement from a top official, Mulvehill said.

“We hope too that the state director for Illinois will soon approve FOD,” she explained, “as the board unanimously approved it in March so that the women in Illinois with FOD can get proper treatment with medical cannabis.”

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 new 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.”

While Alcohol Might ‘Facilitate’ Sexual Encounters, Marijuana Better Enhances Sexual Satisfaction, Study Finds

Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.