NOT ALL SMOKE: CANNABIS & BIRTH CONTROL

Should patients avoid smoking marijuana while taking birth control?

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1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient

2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer 

3. Quick Wrap-up 

Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.

Counselling Conundrum: "There's a sticker on my birth control that says to avoid smoking. Does this include marijuana?"

Concise Conclusion: There is less evidence that smoking marijuana will have the same effects as tobacco (blood clots, stroke, heart attack), however caution should still be exercised since smoking anything can cause stress to your blood vessels, and marijuana has also been shown to increase heart rate and blood pressure, and is associated with heart attack and stroke. As long as you don't smoke a lot and frequently, the risk is likely lower than tobacco.

Quick Wrap-up: Better safe than sorry, but there is no clear evidence to suggest smoking marijuana is as bad as smoking tobacco. We would suggest switching to other dosage forms, perhaps edibles (with proper education on the differences of effect, namely longer onset and duration) to reduce risk.

Dive Deeper

1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7977484/

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