By Dan Skye

Remember that scene from the movie Annie Hall? Diane Keaton and Woody Allen start to get romantic, but she puts a momentary hold on things so she can smoke some pot in order to more fully enjoy the experience? She can’t get into it without the weed.

Woody protests. “Grass. The illusion that it will make a white woman more like Billie Holiday,” he says. “I don’t know why you have to every time we make love.”

Reluctantly, she allows him to take the joint out of her hand. They start the process, but things go downhill. She proceeds to leave her body, get out of bed and contemplate the couple in bed with indifference from a chair across the room. Woody is hard-pressed to get a rise out of his partner.

“You seem sort of distant,” he observes. 

“Let’s just do it, all right?” she sighs. 

“Is it my imagination or are you just going through the motions?” he inquires. 

“You have my body.”

“But I want the whole thing!”

People who love pot love that scene, because the little drama is rooted in truth. Dr. Lester Grinspoon, the revered Harvard Medical School professor and marijuana proponent, talks about a patient he once treated “who felt marijuana was so important to his sexual experience that he no longer wanted to have sex without marijuana.”

He adds, “It caused some difficulty, because his wife was very much opposed to marijuana. She liked sex, but she didn’t like the idea that he needed marijuana for it. It was a question of how to work it out so he could have marijuana without her being exposed to it.”

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