Occasional male cannabis users experience stronger effects than women - News-Medical

Men who use cannabis occasionally reported feeling more high, sedated, and impaired than women with similar use habits, according to a UCLA Health study published in Neuropsychopharmacology in November 2026. The research was conducted by the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers recruited healthy adults split evenly by sex and by cannabis use frequency: weekly or daily use. In three separate sessions, each participant smoked placebo, lower-THC, and higher-THC cannabis without knowing which they had received. Women in the study were not using hormonal birth control and were tested during the same phase of their menstrual cycle.

The analysis found that men who used cannabis occasionally reported more unpleasant effects, such as anxiety, and were the only group whose heart rate rose significantly after smoking active cannabis. Women and men who used cannabis frequently responded to it in similar ways. Regardless of sex, frequent cannabis users exhibited higher markers of cannabis dependence than occasional users.

Blood THC levels did not explain the differences. Men who used cannabis frequently tended to have the highest THC levels, yet they felt fewer effects than men who used it occasionally.

"Much of what we thought we knew about sex differences in cannabis effects came from animal research and from human studies that pooled data from different trials," said Dr. Ziva Cooper, the study's principal investigator and director of the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids. "When we designed a study to look at sex and frequency of use at the same time, and controlled for hormones, the picture changed."

The authors suggest that women may build tolerance to cannabis with less use than men, which larger studies will need to test. The study was limited by a small sample size, exploratory secondary findings, and the use of THC concentrations lower than those found in many contemporary commercial products. The team is now studying high-potency products and adults 55 and older, whose cannabis use is rising.