If a stoned woman and a stoned man disagree about what happened last night, cannabis science suggests we may not want to immediately believe either of them. It appears men and women may experience cannabis differently, which may shock anyone who never met a man and a woman, but researchers are finding that some of those differences may go from appetite to pain, maybe even to memory.
New research suggests that biological sex can be a variable that matters. A study titled Sex Differences in Cannabis Use and Effects, led by Washington State University psychologist Carrie Cuttler, surveyed 2,374 recreational and medical cannabis users about how men and women consume weed and what they say happens when they spark up.
Men reported using ganja more frequently and consuming more of it. They said they were more likely to use joints, blunts, vaporizers and concentrates, while women were more likely to use pipes or gummies. Cuttler’s study reports that men were more likely than women to report increased appetite, improved memory, enthusiasm, altered time perception, and increased musicality when high, while women were more likely than men to report loss of appetite and desire to clean when high. This finding was presumably reported by men who remembered taking the survey.
I asked Dr. Cuttler about this high desire to clean for women. She said, “I found that so weird myself, honestly. I just kind of hate it because it sounds so sexist and stereotypical that… that’s just a weird finding.”
I asked her, “Could a high man actually be remembering worse while confidently believing he’s remembering better?”
“Yeah, definitely. Subjective and objective don’t often map very well, particularly when people are high.”
When gals are high, the enhanced desire to clean makes sense to me, I get the same urge – I may have the cleanest flower vaporizer in Santa Cruz. But I am having trouble with these men who believed, when high, they remembered better. Let’s look to the case of a couple having consumed Parking Lot Weed (ganja so strong you can’t find your car). Somewhere in Santa Cruz, a stoned husband insists he can remember where he parked the car while his stoned wife is hoping to clean it. Research continues to determine if the car was ever found.
But Cuttler did find that when men used flower, their short-term memory performance (holding small amounts of information for 30 seconds) did improve, more than sober men. She found that men showed worse working memory (our mental workbench) than sober men. Cuttler also found women high on concentrates improved their working memory over sober women. “Improvement in things like short-term and working memory seem to be sex dependent.”
Newer research suggests that high memory can be misleading. Cuttler and WSU colleague Ryan McLaughlin recently gave 120 regular cannabis users either placebo cannabis, 20 milligrams of THC or 40 milligrams and tested memory. She found there were mistakes involving false memory. Participants who consumed THC were more likely to report remembering words that they had never seen before. I wondered if this was memory improv, “Yes, and…”.
I asked Dr. Cuttler, “How do false memories happen?” She told me that we’re seeing a decreased threshold in people’s tolerance for saying, “Yeah, I saw that before,” rather than, “No, I didn’t experience that before.” Cuttler describes one possibility: “There could be sort of some spreading activation so that if they’re asked to remember a cluster of words that are all related to each other that it just easily spreads to sort of related concepts and other words.”
Cuttler explains that CB1 receptors are concentrated in the hippocampus and other brain systems that form and retrieve memories. She says THC binds to those receptors and “can disrupt typical normal hippocampal functioning.”
Pain indicates another possible cannabis difference between men and women. In a laboratory experiment with frequent cannabis smokers, men had higher pain tolerance than women. Way more research is needed, but this could be important because many find cannabis a great way to deal with pain.
After all these he-said, she-said differences are said and done, Cuttler qualifies it: “By and large, the differences appear mostly subtle, while larger sex differences show up in how frequently and how much cannabis people consume.”
The science is still very much a work in progress. It lands on comedian Doug Benson’s joke about weed being so strong it’s called Marvin Gaye Weed: “When you smoke it, you say, ‘What’s going on?’”
