What cannabis ads promise about sex may shape young viewers’ intentions

Alcohol advertisers have operated under a long-standing taboo for decades: industry codes in the United States have discouraged brands from suggesting that drinking leads to sexual success, a rule that dates back to the voluntary guidelines the distilled spirits sector adopted shortly after Prohibition ended in 1934 and that has explicitly barred claims linking alcohol to sexual achievement since at least the mid-1990s. Cannabis marketers, by contrast, work in a regulatory vacuum when it comes to this kind of messaging. There is no comparable industrywide code telling cannabis brands that they cannot tie their products to sex, romance, or intimacy, and a new study from Washington State University suggests that this gap may matter for how young adults think about using cannabis in sexual contexts.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Communication Research, was led by Jessica Fitts Willoughby, a professor in WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, with co-author Stacey J.T. Hust, also a professor in the Murrow College. The researchers designed an online experiment involving 747 college students in Washington State who were shown real cannabis advertisements that had been posted on Instagram. Rather than relying on participants’ recollections of advertising they had encountered in the past, an approach common in earlier cannabis marketing research, the team presented specific, verifiable ads and then measured how each viewer interpreted them. This design allowed the investigators to examine how different people extracted different meanings from the same message and whether those individual interpretations were connected to their expectations about cannabis and their stated intentions to use it before sex.

The advertisements themselves spanned a range of visual themes. Some featured sexual or romantic imagery, including people using cannabis in bed and couples in intimate settings, while others depicted recreational scenes such as friends gathered around a bonfire. After viewing the ads, participants were asked a series of questions: what messages they took from each advertisement, what they expected from using cannabis before sex, and whether they intended to do so. This structure gave the researchers a way to separate exposure from interpretation, two things that earlier studies had often conflated by simply asking people how much cannabis advertising they remembered seeing.

The central finding of the experiment is that interpretation, not mere exposure, appears to be the key variable. Simply seeing a sexual or romantic advertisement did not consistently predict how viewers answered the researchers’ questions. What mattered was what viewers believed the ad was telling them. Students who interpreted an advertisement as suggesting that cannabis use results in better sex were more likely to expect those benefits for themselves, including the expectation that cannabis could improve their sexual experiences or reduce nervousness, and they were also more likely to say they might use cannabis before sex. Crucially, this pattern held whether or not the ad itself featured explicit sexual themes, indicating that the perceived promise of sexual benefit could be read into recreational imagery as well.

Willoughby framed the distinction between exposure and interpretation as central to the study’s contribution. “It wasn’t as simple as seeing a message and automatically being influenced by it,” she said. “The stronger connection appeared when someone interpreted the ad as saying cannabis makes sex better and then they thought it might do the same for them.” In other words, the persuasive pathway ran through the viewer’s own reading of the ad’s implied claim, a mechanism consistent with what researchers have long observed in alcohol advertising, where sexualized appeals can shape how people understand the information being presented. “We know from alcohol advertising that sexualized appeals can make a difference in how people understand the information presented,” Willoughby noted, adding that cannabis is different because “there really aren’t rules saying you can’t tie it to sex.”

The experiment also uncovered meaningful gender differences in how the ads operated. Men who wanted to be like the men depicted in the sexual or romantic advertisements, figures who were typically portrayed as physically fit, attractive, and masculine, were more likely to say they intended to use cannabis before sex. This suggests that for some male viewers, the ads may function through a form of social modeling, in which the depicted consumer becomes an aspirational figure whose behavior the viewer imagines adopting. Women responded to a different dimension of the same messages: those who thought the ads raised concerns about sexual consent were less likely to say they would use cannabis before sex. The same advertising content, in other words, could activate aspirational identification in one group and risk awareness in another, depending on how the viewer processed it.

That divergence carries practical weight for public health communication. Because consent emerged as a lever that shifted women’s stated intentions, health officials seeking to discourage cannabis use before sex may have a concrete messaging strategy available to them. “If health communicators want to address cannabis use before sex, they could create messages that clearly explain how it may affect decision making or consent,” Hust said. “Our findings suggest that those messages could make people, particularly women, less likely to intend to use cannabis before sex.” The finding is notable because it points to a specific, testable content strategy: rather than generic warnings, messages that directly address how cannabis may affect judgment and the capacity to give or recognize consent may resonate with the segment of the audience most responsive to that concern.

The policy implications extend beyond health messaging into the question of how cannabis advertising should be governed. Washington State prohibits cannabis ads aimed at people younger than 21, but the state’s rules do not specifically bar companies from suggesting that cannabis can improve sex or romantic experiences. At the national level, the cannabis industry has no voluntary code comparable to the distilled spirits industry’s guidelines, which have prohibited claims linking alcohol to sexual success since at least the mid-1990s. This asymmetry means that a claim considered off-limits in alcohol marketing for nearly three decades remains an open creative option for cannabis brands advertising on platforms such as Instagram, where young adults, including college students, form a substantial share of the audience.

Hust argues that the study’s results speak directly to that regulatory debate. “The larger question is whether cannabis advertisements should be regulated more like those for other adult-use products, such as alcohol,” she said. “Our findings show that when people interpret these ads as promising positive sexual experiences, that can shape what they expect from cannabis and whether they intend to use it.” The experimental evidence provides a mechanism for that argument: if the persuasive effect depends on viewers reading a sexual-benefit claim into an ad, then rules that restrict such claims, as the alcohol industry’s code does, would target precisely the interpretations the study linked to intentions to use cannabis before sex.

The research arrives at a moment when cannabis legalization has expanded the advertising landscape faster than the norms and rules that govern it. By showing that the same Instagram ads can produce different effects depending on whether viewers see a promise of better sex or a warning about consent, the WSU team has given both regulators and health communicators a more precise picture of how cannabis marketing may influence sexual decision making among young adults. The study, titled “Sex, Romance, or Recreation? An Experiment Testing the Effects of Cannabis Brand-generated Social Media Ads on College Students’ Expectancies and Intentions to Use Cannabis Prior to Sex,” was published in Communication Research on 31 August 2026, and its authors suggest the findings could ultimately help shape both public health messages and advertising policies in what remains a largely unregulated area of marketing.

Subject of Research: An experimental study of how cannabis social media advertising shapes college students' sexual expectancies and intentions to use cannabis before sex.

Article Title: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex

Article References: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cannabis advertising, social media, sexual expectancies, consent, college students, Communication Research, Washington State University, public health, advertising policy, Instagram, alcohol industry guidelines, experiment