Where there is smoke, there tends to be fire, say medical researchers who found frequent marijuana users have about 20 percent more sex than those who abstain. University School of Medicine researchers unveiled the link between marijuana and the frequency of sexual intercourse in a study published on Friday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Researchers reached their conclusions after a retrospective analysis of data on 50,000 Americans ages 25 to 45, compiled from 2002 to 2015 by the National Survey of Family Growth. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsors the survey. Respondents were asked how many times they have had heterosexual intercourse in the past four weeks and how frequently they have smoked marijuana over the past 12 months, researchers said in a press release. 
Women who were daily pot users had sex an average of 7.1 times during the previous four weeks, compared with 6.0 times reported by those who denied using marijuana in the past year. For men, daily users reported 6.9 times compared with 5.6 for non-users. “In other words, pot users are having about 20 percent more sex than pot abstainers. Given that the average couple has sex about once a week, Doctors said, the bottom line for partaking in a bong or blunt could add up to 20 more instances of sexual intercourse each year. “I think if you asked a man or a woman, 20 more times to have sex over a year, that would seem like a lot,” he said. It used to be thought that couples mostly smoked after sex, but said his findings show the opposite is true for “all races, ages, education levels, income groups and religions, every health status, whether they were married or single and whether or not they had kids.” Marijuana is legal for medical or recreational adult use in 29 states and the District of Columbia, said spokesman of the Marijuana Policy Project. A record percentage of Americans – 64 percent – now believe adult use of the drug should be legal, according to a Gallup poll published this week. Sarasota Marijuana Doctors cautioned the study should not be misinterpreted as having proven a causal link. “It doesn’t say if you smoke more marijuana, you’ll have more sex,” he said. Still, for many, research in the name of science may never be so fun.
A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces a threefold risk of dying from high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug. Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product says one marijuana doctor in fort lauderdale. However, the study highlights some key areas for future study including how using cannabis might affect the heart. Here’s what you need to know. “We found that marijuana users had a greater than three-fold risk of death from hypertension and the risk increased with each additional year of use,” The lead author of the study and a doctoral student of epidemiology and biostatistics at GUS, said in a statement. For her paper, published Wednesday in the where they looked at more than 1,800 people age 21 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey. In 2008, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers. The researchers then merged that data with statistics on death from all causes, pulled from the US National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted it to rule out any factors that could muddle the results, like gender, race, and a history of smoking tobacco. Overall, those classified as marijuana users were found to be 3.42 times as likely to die from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who said they had never used. That risk also appeared to rise by a factor of 1.04 with what the researchers labeled “each year of use.” Here’s the problem: The study’s authors defined anyone who said they had ever tried marijuana as a “regular user.” Other research suggests this is a poor assumption. According to a recent survey, about 52% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 14% said they used the drug “regularly,” defined as “at least once a month.” Also, the study was observational, meaning it followed a group of people over time and reported what happened to them, so the researchers cannot conclude a cause and effect — they can’t say that smoking marijuana causes high blood pressure, only that the two things appear to be linked. The authors wrote, “From our results, marijuana use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.” Another issue is the unregulated nature of the existing, and largely illegal, cannabis market. People are using a wide variety of strains whose concentrations of compounds — there are up to 400 in marijuana, including THC and CBD — can differ drastically. While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists and some Lakeland Marijuana Doctors know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to suss out how it affects things like high blood pressure. For example, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ingesting marijuana increases heart rate by between 20 and 50 beats a minute for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours. But a large, recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that florida marijuana doctors cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack, though it also found some limited evidence that using the drug could be a trigger for the phenomenon. When it comes to cannabis’ effect on blood pressure, the results are also inconclusive. One very small study, for example, found a sharp increase in blood pressure immediately after regular pot users stopped using the drug. “Abrupt cessation of heavy cannabis use may cause clinically significant increases in blood pressure in a subset of users,” that study’s researchers wrote. And according to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased, not increased blood pressure.