With marijuana going mainstream, there are a whole lot of interesting questions for public health researchers.

How will legal marijuana affect our children? Our jobs?

Or how about our sex lives?

That latter question inspired a research project by Joseph Palamar and his colleagues at New York University.

“Since the landscape is changing, and marijuana continues to increase in popularity, research is needed to continue to examine if and how marijuana use may influence risk for unsafe sexual behaviour,” they wrote in the July issue of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

To that end, Palamar and his colleagues recruited 24 heterosexual adults to take part in a series of in-depth interviews about prior sexual experiences that happened under the influence of either alcohol or marijuana.

Here are a few of the observations the researchers drew from the interviews:

•Beer goggles are real.

Respondents “overwhelmingly reported that alcohol use was more likely to (negatively) affect the partners they chose,” the study found. Men and women were fairly likely to say that alcohol had the effect of lowering their standards for who they slept with, in terms of character and appearance. With marijuana, this seemed to be much less of an issue.

“With weed I know who I’m waking up with. With drinking, you don’t know. Once you start drinking, everybody looks good,” a 34-year-old female said.

•Drunk sex often leads to regret. Stoned sex typically doesn’t.

“The most commonly reported feeling after sex on alcohol was regret,” the study found. This was rarely the case with pot.

“I want to cook the person something to eat (after sex) when I’m high,” one male respondent said. “When I’m drunk, it’s like, ‘I’m out of here.’”

•Drunk sex can make you sick. Stoned sex can make you distracted.

“Nausea, dizziness, feeling sick (and vomiting), and blacking out were commonly reported to be associated with alcohol use,” the study found.

There were fewer adverse effects reported with marijuana, and these tended to be more mental. One respondent reported that being high distracted her from the experience.

•The pleasure is usually better on marijuana.

The study found that “alcohol tended to numb sensations and marijuana tended to enhance sensations.”

The study also found that men and women reported longer and more intense orgasms on marijuana.

•Drunk sex is riskier overall.

“With regard to sexual risk behaviour, the majority of participants felt that alcohol was riskier, sexually, than marijuana,” Palamar and his colleagues found. People typically said they exercised poorer judgment when drunk than when stoned.