Illinois Approves Female Orgasm Disorder As A Medical Marijuana Qualifying Condition, While Oregon Rejects Similar Proposal
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Officials in two states have issued differing decisions on whether to add female orgasm difficulty/disorder (FOD) as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana in their respective programs: Illinois health authorities have formally OK’d the addition, while regulators in Oregon have denied it.
“This is significant,” Suzanne Mulvehill, a clinical sexologist and researcher who has pushed to add FOD to state marijuana programs, said of the update in Illinois.
She added in an email to Marijuana Moment that advocates intend to appeal the Oregon rejection and are in the process of finding an attorney. Mulvehill is also looking into appealing similar rejections by officials in Arkansas and Maryland.
So far three states—Illinois, Connecticut and New Mexico—have taken steps to include FOD as a qualifying condition. In Ohio, meanwhile, regulators denied a petition this past May.
The Illinois addition was given preliminary approval by the state Medical Cannabis Advisory Board earlier this year—a recommendation recently signed off on by the state health department.
“I am pleased to inform you that your petition to add Female Orgasmic Disorder to the list of qualifying debilitating conditions recognized by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), has been approved,” the agency’s director, Sameer Vohra, wrote in a November 14 letter to the petitioner behind the request, a copy of which was reviewed by Marijuana Moment. “We will begin the process of updating our official list of qualifying debilitating medical conditions to include Female Orgasmic Disorder.”
The decision will also “be communicated to healthcare providers and relevant stakeholders to ensure that patients can benefit from the newly available treatment options as soon as possible,” Vohra wrote.
“After fully considering the matters raised in the petition as well as reviewing research pertinent to the condition termed Female Orgasmic Disorder,” says supporting documentation signed by the IDPH director, “there is sufficient evidence to confidently evaluate the effect of cannabis as a treatment for Female Orgasmic Disorder. Literature review and survey data support that cannabis can offer benefits to individuals who have ‘female orgasm difficulties or dysfunction.’”
In Oregon, meanwhile, officials at the Oregon Health Authority rejected the petition 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, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (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? Ditto for Maryland and Arkansas.”
In a follow-up email, Mulvehill added that after reviewing the state’s denial letter, “it became evident that only ONE peer reviewed study was reviewed” despite the petition itself including 13 studies.
“If necessary, we will appeal the decision to have these additional peer-reviewed studies reviewed and included in the petition,” she wrote. “We also will inquire if they reached out to the specialists as they requested names of specialists who treat FOD with cannabis.”
Officials in Maryland, for their part, concluded earlier this year that the bulk of studies submitted as part of advocates’ petition failed to adequately demonstrate that cannabis can treat FOD, but 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.
Maryland regulators also pointed out that people with FOD may still have a legal path to medical marijuana, writing that licensed healthcare providers in the state may already “certify patients for medical cannabis in Maryland for another ‘chronic medical condition which is severe and for which other treatments have been ineffective’ in addition to the list of current approved qualifying conditions.”
Tishler told Marijuana Moment after the Maryland decision that he thought the state’s “expectations of the evidence are too high and [it] may be applying a standard to FOD more stringent that other diagnoses,” echoing Mulvehill’s criticism of Oregon’s reasoning.
Tishler pointed out that trials are expensive and, regardless of condition, are still relatively uncommon in the cannabis space. He and Mulvehill have been working toward a randomized controlled trial of cannabis for FOD, he said, but so far are “not finding a supportive regulatory environment, nor any funding.”
“Overall,” he added at the time, “I’m concerned that questions about the amount/quality of the data on FOD (when compared to other conditions that have been approved) are really a smokescreen for systemic misogyny.”
Mulvehill agreed.
“There is a broader issue coming to light through these denials—gender bias,” she told Marijuana Moment after the Arkansas decision. “At one point, women needed to fight for their right to vote, now women have to fight for their right to be healthy. These denials are examples of that.”
As more states consider the addition, the two researchers have expanded their advocacy and education efforts. Mulvehill told Marijuana Moment earlier this year that she’s developing training programs to help therapists better incorporate cannabis as medicine and is working on a podcast called The Orgasm Hour. Mulvehill and Tishler also have a forthcoming journal article that’s currently in the review process, she said.
“We worked with volunteers and petitioned 11 states in the last year and a half,” Mulvehill said in an email this week. “Two states approved FOD, five states denied it (AR, OH, MS, MD, OR) and several are pending decisions and meetings. We anticipate New Mexico will be the third state to approve FOD as their board voted to approve FOD in October, 2024.”
She pointed to “stigma and shame” as among the main reasons supporters have faced obstacles in their efforts.
“Public policy reflects what is accepted in society, so adding FOD to the list of qualifying conditions to treat with medical cannabis is important to de-stigmatize FOD and relieve the suffering women experience who have FOD,” Mulvehill said. “Anyone who reads through the comments on the reddit thread r/becomingorgasmic will feel the suffering women endure who have FOD.”
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, 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, cautions 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 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.”
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