Cannabis Becomes the Sex Pot
I remember the first time I smoked weed like it was five minutes ago.
I was 13 years old and had gone to see a movie with a group of my girlfriends. My hair was permed and my tits were nonexistent. I had yet to be punished with braces (that would come the following year) and my only care was pleasing my parents just enough for them to leave me alone. My girlfriends and I snuck out back of the strip mall complex and behind a restaurant beside the theater. My friend, Liana, pulled out an apple and a bag of pot from her Jansport backpack.
She had prepared the apple at home, so the holes were set and we were ready to smoke. When the apple got to me, I sucked face with it like a horny Snow White and tried my best to inhale the way Liana was instructing. I had smoked a total of seven cigarettes in my life, so taking smoke was foreign to my teenage lungs. We refilled the apple bowl over and over. Whenever someone dropped it, we’d all started laughing hysterically while scrambling to collect the charred nugs. Suddenly a dishwasher from the restaurant stepped out the back door and we ran like criminals.
I didn’t feel stoned right away, but once that first fistfull of popcorn missed my mouth and landed on my chest, I doubled over in laughter. Yes, I was stoned. Colors, sounds, and textures were amplified. I was suddenly so aware of how sticky my hands were. I tried to ignore the urge to go wash them in the girls’ room but it was pestering me like water torture. My mind did somersaults as I sunk into the theater seat. Why had movies never been this funny before?
From then on, I smoked a lot of weed in my youth because that’s what you do in your youth. It’s easy to put back a joint or two a day when your responsibilities are homework, learning to drive, and doing the dishes. We made “lungs” out of two-liter soda bottles and plastic bags. We smoked out of cans when we couldn’t find papers. We built makeshift bongs out of plastic 7-11 novelty items and watched Half Baked on repeat.
This was British Columbia, and everyone was into weed. My family is peppered with casual pot users. I used to have to buy my Uncle Chris $200 worth every time he came into town for a business trip. The first time I smoked with my dad I was 15 years old and on a family vacation with a bunch of my relatives and younger cousins. He took my brother and me to the beach before dinner. When we were good and stoned, we went inside and sat down at the table. My mom immediately knew what was up and stared daggers into my dad’s glossy red eyes. He just poured himself another gin. “Come on,” he laughed. “We’re on vacation!”
That’s the thing about weed and what eventually made me stop in my twenties: It put my mind on vacation. I was never good at portion control and usually got too stoned. Like the time my friend Sarah gave me four pot cookies to take home, and I ate them all while walking to another friend’s house to finish a group project for French class. By the time I knocked on her door and opened my notebook, my brain had crash-landed on the moon. Have you ever listened to North American teenagers try to speak French while high out of your skull? I was laughing so hard I forgot my native tongue. I ended up puking a little bit, then passed out on the couch. I didn’t try edibles again for over a decade.
The first time I smoked weed with my dad I was 15 years old.
When I worked at the local grocery store, I would smoke weed with the produce boys on my breaks and after work every night. Being a stoned cashier sent me into Rain Man mode. I would try to solve math problems no one needed to, like figuring out how many times the scanner beeped during a shift by averaging the beeps per minute by my hours clocked. (My math was definitely not accurate.) Driving home stoned took years. I once caught myself doing a steady 20 in a 55 mph zone.
Smoking weed and going to class was an even bigger waste of brain. By the time college came around, I decided it was time to drop the daily bong rips and just binge drink and dabble in cocaine like a normal person. Except when it came to sex. I liked taking a modest hit of weed and fucking, especially with someone I actually liked. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, weed had become a novelty that usually accompanied dick. (And that dick usually provided the weed.)
A few years ago, while pushing 30, I was assigned a story about the latest development in sexuality and women’s health: an all-natural, THC-infused sexual enhancement oil called Foria Pleasure. Everyone from ABC News to Cosmopolitan to Bill Maher was calling it “weed lube.” Then I met up with the brand’s California cofounder, Matthew Gerson, to talk about it.
“I have some marijuana plants growing right now,” he explained to me across the table. “If you spend time with this plant, it’s a fascinating weed. Marijuana is essentially a very horny female plant. It’s the female that is harvested and secretes the fluid, wants to be pollinated, and when it’s pollinated becomes stressed out and produces more and more. There’s this weird connection between he human female and the female plant. We have evolved with plants. We have a receptor that successfully absorbs THC. We have that capacity to absorb the pollen the plant secretes because our physiology coevolved.”
In my entire history of smoking weed, I never actually thought about its harvest. Or that it was as horny as I was.
There are two dominant cannabinoids in the marijuana plant: cannabidiol (CBD), which is the non-psychoactive, pain-relieving element, and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which releases dopamine in the brain, but also stimulates a neurochemical called anandamide, or “the bliss molecule.” THC is the cannabinoid that makes you feel high as a kite. However, it has many other positive functions when used on the body in different ways.
Cannabinoid extraction methods have gone from nonexistent to NASA-level. Today, cannabis cultivators have created ingenious ways of sucking the drugs out of the plant, liquifying them into new forms like concentrates or oils. What Foria discovered is that THC helps increase blood flow when applied topically to the clitoris and labia. The lining of the vagina quickly absorbs it into the bloodstream. This is the genius of Foria: it’s getting your vagina, not your brain, stimulated.
It wasn’t like I had trouble enjoying sex. I didn’t need any chemical assistance or to trick my pussy into sex by getting it “stoned.” Foria became this new bonus. It was more lubricating than my favorite water-ased lubricant, Slippery Stuff, and I required a fraction of the amount. Foria is a pre-sex mist, not an actual lube you continue to apply throughout. When I spritzed it onto my clit, the THC never crossed my blood-brain barrier, which means I didn’t feel stoned in my head. However, when my husband licked it off me, he got high.
After a week of using it, we had mastered our method: two sprays in the mouth, and three down south. (We keep a bottle on our bedside table to this day.) Foria wasn’t this magical oil that made orgasms shoot out of me like fireworks. Cannabis doesn’t work like that when it’s being absorbed through the mucus membranes and labia. I think that’s what I liked about it. It was aiding my body in a new way that was improving my sex life and overall health. My body was doing the portion control for me.
I kept in touch with Gerson and he informed me about Foria’s new creations with the horny girl plant. Within a year, Foria had linked up with celebrity urologist Dr. Jen Berman to create a wildly successful vaginal suppository, Relief, designed to reduce menstrual pain. Half a year later came their rectal suppository, Explore, for anal sex play and pain relief. I tried them both and was hooked.
Have you ever shoved cannabis up your asshole? Of course you haven’t! It’s never been a “thing” until now. Why do you think British schoolgirls used to soak tampons in vodka and shove them up their butts? It was so they could be drunk undetected at school. Stevie Nicks didn’t have her assistant blow cocaine into her ear, now did she? No, she went straight for the b-hole.
I may not smoke weed anymore, but I’m more than happy to put it on and inside myself.
I didn’t need any chemical assistance or to trick my pussy into sex by getting it “stoned.”
“THE best thing we have found to normalize the human body is cannabis,” California-based chiropractor Dr. Allen Miller tells me. He specializes in chronic pain and sports-injury management, and we met at a cannabis event in Malibu. “Our bodies were made to take this plant, just like vitamin C or D or any other mineral in your body. The body is very organized and if it needs something, it has receptors for it. CBD and THC sit like a lock and key to the receptors in the body.”
Men have Viagra and Cialis, but the lack of pharmaceuticals created to aid women’s sexual dysfunction is less about gender discrimination and more about science. Numerous studies have linked erectile dysfunction to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol, so although your boner is a quality of life issue, it can also be connected to serious medical issues. On the other hand, the link between female sexual-arousal problems and high-risk conditions is yet to be determined.
Miller believes cannabis oil is the perfect aid for sexual health, especially for older men and women who are facing the biological realities of being post-reproduction. A decreased amount of estrogen results in the thinning of the vaginal walls, which is extremely painful for women; THC helps stimulate the blood flow in that area.
However, many studies insist that there’s a link between erectile dysfunction and marijuana users. A Journal of Sexual Medicine study suggests that when THC interacts with cannabinoid receptors in the brain, it impairs function. Because there are also cannabinoid receptors in the penile tissue, researchers concluded THC could likely cause erectile dysfunction. Then again, it might also be helpful in preventing premature ejaculation.
Allegedly, a low dose of cannabis can increase sexual appetite, while a high dose could quell it. Portion control is key when using cannabis, which is why topically applying it to my labia is going to result in increased pleasure, while smoking it straight to my head will make me rethink the fact that I even have a labia.
Maybe I wasn’t back on board with bong rips, but using cannabis to increase my sexual health restored my interest in the plant. You could say that my vagina is now addicted to weed, which I now use regularly to manage my period cramps and increase the intensity of my orgasms. But using weed to enhance sex is nothing new.
In the 1930s, Russian brides mixed cannabis with lamb’s fat to consume on their wedding night to enhance sexual pleasure. In west Uganda, men use cannabis as a traditional remedy for erectile dysfunction. Hindu and Buddhist tantric cannabis practices date back to 700 A.D. Cannabis has been with us for centuries, and yet we are only in the infancy of discovering its healing properties.
I spent years away from cannabis because I thought I always got too stoned from smoking, and I started to worry more about what went into my body, too. Nowadays, you don’t need to smoke; with all the oils, tinctures, vapes, and sprays, there are so many means of taking cannabis. Being able to use it on my pussy was the gateway to getting it back into my life.
Cannabis has gone from being just something teenagers do to get fucked up and have fun to a respected method of pain relief and healing. A physician now writes you a recommendation script for weed so you can use it to improve your sex life.
Now tell that to your grandmother.
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