marijuana and testosterone

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

regarding the adverse effects of marijuana (straight dope 4/14/06)…
cecil said nothing about effects on testosterone!
what is the straight dope?
could ganja act as an anti-steroid ?
thanks!

2

The best answer you’ll get is that studies have shown conflicting answers. A quick search of PubMed (a medical website, with as little bias as any source I can find online), shows

Chronic marijuana use showed no significant effect on hormone concentrations in either men or women.
No influence of long-term cannabis usage on plasma testosterone levels was found.

Plasma prolactin, ACTH, cortisol, luteinizing hormone and testosterone were not altered during or after THC, compared with baseline concentrations.

And yet, “A reanalysis of existing data established that testosterone levels are depressed both after smoking one marijuana cigarette and after intravenous infusion of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, a pharmacologically active component of marijuana.”

But don’t toke up freely just yet. There are also studies that show:

Cannabis, hashish and marijuana initially increase libido and potency, but chronic use causes sexual inversion.

This may be because marijuana affects things other than testosterone, perhaps increasing estrogen production:
These results indicate that there are some metabolic interactions between cannabinoid and steroid metabolism and that the constituents showing estrogen-like activity exist in marijuana.

Finally, in the real world it’s difficult to separate out the effects of other drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, which are used more by marijuana users. Perhaps these things in combination produce body effects not seen with only one drug. At the very least, it seems “Our report demonstrates that smoking has a strong negative impact on male sexual life, even if it is associated at an apparently more sexual-favourable hormonal milieu.”