Ohio medical marijuana regulators on Wednesday decided not to advance a petition seeking to add female orgasmic difficulty (FOD) to the state’s list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana, reasoning that most patients with the condition would also be eligible for cannabis under other recognized conditions, such as pain or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Advocates have been working since last year to convince the Ohio Medical Cannabis Board to approve the condition, also known as female orgasmic disorder. And though the current petition will not move forward, organizers say they’re undeterred and will try again at the next opportunity.
A separate petition seeking to add refractory autism spectrum disorder, meanwhile, will proceed to an open public comment period and expert review.
Suzanne Mulvehill, a clinical sexologist and researcher who has pushed to add FOD to medical marijuana programs in several states, told Marijuana Moment that “fifty years of research and anecdotal reports reveal that cannabis can successfully treat FOD.”
“FOD affects the health and wellbeing of millions of women worldwide and has many causes and co-morbidities, including gynecological cancer and treatments such as hysterectomies, menopause, chronic diseases, diabetes and prescription medication, among others,” she said in an email. “We are grateful to our dedicated volunteers who work with us to educate and advocate to get FOD approved as a treatable condition with medical cannabis.”
As for Ohio officials’ contention that FOD patients could obtain cannabis recommendations for other conditions, Mulvehill said that’s only true in some cases—not all.
“While PTSD and pain are conditions that can impact FOD, they are not the only conditions, thus leaving out thousands of Ohio women who suffer from FOD,” she said, noting that other causes include menopause, cognitive distraction, anxiety and/or depression, childhood sexual abuse and “sociocultural, psychological, and relationship factors.”
The latest Ohio petition to add FOD as a qualifying condition was submitted by Dr. Douglas Woo, a neurologist based in Athens, Ohio, who also submitted the autism petition, according to Mulvehill. She said two other women are planning to renew the effort on FOD at the next opportunity to submit petitions.
So far three states—Illinois, Connecticut and New Mexico—have taken steps to include FOD as a qualifying condition. The Illinois addition was given preliminary approval by the state Medical Cannabis Advisory Board last March—a recommendation recently signed off on by the state health department.
In Oregon, meanwhile, officials at the Oregon Health Authority rejected a petition there based largely on a lack of randomized controlled trials supporting cannabis as an effective therapy for FOD.
“Such studies are needed not only to demonstrate any benefit of cannabis in treating FOD,” the agency wrote in a December 6 letter to the petitioner in that state, “but also to elucidate potential adverse (harmful) effects, effective dosage, means of consumption, and other relevant factors to consider.”
Mulvehill, whose work includes a focus on the use of cannabis to treat FOD, told Marijuana Moment that Oregon’s decision is inconsistent with the state’s inclusion of other qualifying conditions, PTSD.
“Note that Oregon was one of the first states to approve PTSD—in 2013, without ANY published studies or randomized controlled trials,” she said. “Why stricter guidelines for FOD?”
Mulvehill said in an emailed update to supporters earlier this week that Oregon’s rejection of FOD is being appealed, with a hearing scheduled for early April.
Efforts are also underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Jersey.
Mulvehill is also seeking eligible petitioners to file FOD-related requests in Arizona, Delaware and Nevada.
Regulators in Maryland, Arkansas and Mississippi, meanwhile, have rejected earlier petitions in those states. Mulvehill’s update says new petitions are expected to be submitted along with at least one other women’s condition, such as ovarian cysts, uterine fibroids or endometriosis—all of which were approved in Illinois, along with FOD.
A study published last year on marijuana and endometriosis found that that women who consumed cannabis rated it as “the most effective self-management strategy to reduce symptom intensity” of the often painful inflammatory disease.
While Maryland officials denied the FOD petition, they acknowledged two recent studies that officials admitted are promising—including one by Mulvehill and co-author Jordan Tishler, a doctor and cannabis specialist, indicating that marijuana can provide benefits such increased orgasm frequency, improved satisfaction and greater ease achieving orgasm.
Among other research into marijuana and sexual health, a 2023 study 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, also 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, cautioned that more marijuana doesn’t necessarily make for 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 last 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.
A paper last year 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, for example, 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.”
Medical Marijuana Is ‘More Effective Than Prescription Medications’ For Treating Chronic Pain, Study Finds
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
Read the full article here