DreamWorks Pictures/PexelsHere’s a new one: weed may have been responsible for a man’s very painful 12-hour erection.
If you’re a man sitting reading this right now, smoking some marijuana (in a location where it’s perfectly legal to do so, of course), try not to panic about the doom of a debilitating, cannabis-induced boner.
This is a very specific case where doctors believe a man’s half-day erection may have been caused by marijuana use.
Cinema 5Over the past two weeks, a 32-year-old Georgia man – whose identity has mercifully not been released – had to be rushed to the emergency room, suffering not just one, but two unstoppable boners.
The gentleman’s first erection lasted a whopping 12 hours and was brought to an end after doctors treated the hard-tissue issue with a ‘needle aspiration with phenylephrine injection leading to successful detumescence’. However, not long afterwards, the man returned to hospital with a six-hour stiffy, as per the Journal of Cannabis Research.
He was diagnosed with priapism, ‘defined by an erection that persists for longer than four hours that is not related to sexual stimulation’.
Dimension FilmsThe article explained:
We present the case of a healthy 32-year-old African American man who presents to the emergency department with persistent erection for six hrs not related to sexual activity.
He admitted to smoking cannabis several nights per week for the past six months, including within the two hour period prior to each presenting episode of priapism. During this time, the patient had four or more episodes of a persistent erection lasting close to four hours that were self-resolving.
The man also admitted to a history of cannabis use during the ages of 16 and 17, when he’d regularly battle long-lasting erections – however, back then, he never required medical treatment.
Here’s the curious thing: in his twenties he stopped smoking weed, and then never suffered any episodes of priapism (he also specifically denied any ‘history of psychiatric disease and took no prescribed or over-the-counter medications’).
PixabayDr. Jamin Brahmbhatt is cautious of the findings, however. ‘Everything here is hypothetical until validated by research,’ he told Insider, adding: ‘Marijuana is a vasodilator so it could lead to over-dilation of the penile vessels. Oftentimes marijuana can be tainted with other drugs/chemicals, so the additives could be the cause of the problem.’
However, to be blunt, priapism isn’t something to brush off. ‘The concern is if the erection lasts more than four hours the penis can lose vital oxygen and nutrients. This can lead to pain, swelling, loss of future erections, and loss of the penis,’ the doctor added.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.