A lot of THC ingestion may leave you lighter in the gentlemen’s department.
Despite its illegality in Australia, the consumption of cannabis products in Australia has a considerable fan base.
The practice is even more popular in the US, where the sale and possession of cannabis is now either legal or decriminalised in more than half of nation’s states and territories.
This has led to the entrepreneurial development of “consumer friendly” cannabis products which purport to be a healthier alternative to the more traditional consumptions methods, such as the humungous doobie or the bucket bong, or so we are led to believe.
These innovations include cannabis gummies, which look just like those sickly sugary chewy treats you see in the supermarket confectionary aisles and on pharmacy shelves, except they pack a bit more of a punch.
Now, we used the words “purport to be healthier” because, while it’s clearly better for your lungs not be inhaling cannabis smoke, new research suggests ingesting cannabis gummies is not without some negative physiological consequences.
Chief among them is a rather unfortunate repercussion in the gentlemen’s department.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the Oregon Health & Science University have revealed that over-indulgence in ingestible cannabis can cause a male’s testicles to shrink and testosterone levels to fall.
Now before you chaps go racing to the bathroom mirror, we feel obliged to point out that the phenomenon has so far only been observed in monkeys, rhesus macaques to be specific.
But, yes, the researchers did dope up the primates with a daily dose of THC edibles “at medically and recreationally relevant doses” for a period of nine months. What’s more, when they increased the dosages the physical impacts increased significantly.
“For each 1 mg/7kg/day increase in THC dosing, there was a marked loss in total bilateral testicular volume of 11.8 cm3. In total, average bilateral testicular volume decreased by 58%,” the researchers said in their study, which was published in the journal Fertility & Sterility.
While the study findings are only preliminary, and only in monkeys, the question of the detrimental impact of cannabis consumption on sexual performance and fertility has been kicking around for a few years now.
For example, in 2019 a systematic review of studies suggested cannabis can reduce sperm count as well as libido in both animals and humans.
And as cannabis consumption inevitably increases as more and more jurisdictions decriminalise the drug’s use, the health consequences of those decisions come into sharper focus.
If you see something that stuns your mullet, don’t bogart that joint. Blow that smoke over to felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au
