The United States is slowly learning that cannabis can enhance more than trippy movies and tables full of munchies. The plant can also be part of your overall self-care routine. It has been said to benefit mental health and exercise routines if intentions are set. And new studies suggest that cannabis can also improve sexual pleasure.

The plant is said to have the power to make you last longer, feel deeper and clear the emotional baggage that could get in the way of pure pleasure—including solo pleasure.

While there is no rule book for incorporating cannabis into your masturbatory practice, you can start with infused lubes for spot-specific use. These lubes are specifically made for sex of all kinds, so experimentation is simple: Just set aside alone time, rub the topical onto your preferred pleasure point and begin.

If lube isn’t readily available, don’t fret. Smoking, eating or vaping is also reported to have positive effects on masturbation—but keep in mind that it will likely be an all-over body high versus a targeted one.

Luna Matatas, a sex educator based in Toronto, loves to smoke a joint and masturbate. “I find it’s a great ritual for me,” she says. “I’ll set the room, maybe I’ll light a candle, maybe I’ll put on a sexy stripper kind of playlist, and then I’ll get high and start to ease into masturbation. So it’s like a pot-and-masturbation date for myself. It’s a dedicated space for practicing self-pleasure.”

For Matatas, cannabis serves as a focal point. Without it, she finds herself getting distracted during sex or masturbation, thinking about her grocery list or an overflowing laundry basket. “Weed helps me quiet my mind, create that space to focus on whatever is happening in the moment and be more porous to the pleasure that’s coming in from increased sensation,” she says, adding that she sees masturbation as a form of meditation. “We get this opportunity to have our erotic imagination opened up, we get to explore pleasure that’s not necessarily orgasm-focused, but maybe we just want to touch ourselves and feel where some of these underserviced erogenous spots are.”

Bianca Blanche, a budtender and cannabis advocate, has plenty of experience guiding consumers toward products that suit their particular needs and desires. What does she recommend when the subject of masturbation comes up? “It really depends on the patient’s intake preference, because there are so many ways you can play around with cannabis in the bedroom,” she says. A low-dose edible will make you feel “grounded and in your body and maybe just a little more sensitive to everything.” THC’s mood-enhancing abilities also come into play: “It makes you a little bit sillier, a little more open-minded, a little less on guard and more vulnerable. They’re all the ingredients for intimacy, whether it’s with yourself or another.”

Cannabis can be especially beneficial for those who feel guilt or shame around masturbation. Matatas explains that “there still isn’t a broad acceptance of masturbation as a relationship to yourself and your own sexuality and your own pleasure.” Bonus: Using cannabis alone can also inspire you to approach partners about incorporating it into your shared sex life.

“We found that women who used marijuana before sex—and they were 99 percent smoking it—recorded an increase in overall sexual satisfaction, better orgasms and increasing desire.”

Even if you live in an area where weed is legal for recreational use, you may feel uncomfortable walking into a local dispensary and asking for a lube recommendation. Don’t. Blanche says customers have regularly brought up sex in her nearly five years as a California budtender. Knowing this interview’s focus, she says, “I was like, ‘Let me just jerk off real quick using my own stuff before she calls.’” It’s that playful, down-to-earth attitude that inspires customers to open up to her at work.

“I’ve known things about their sexual history that I didn’t necessarily ask for,” she continues. “Like, I’ve known the last time a patient of mine gave her husband a blow job, because she felt she could tell me that.”

Still, some customers aren’t sure how to broach the subject. “A lot of people come in and kind of whisper to me,” Blanche says. But she insists that customers be respectful when broaching the subject in a retail space. “Consent is a big topic right now, and I think even just asking your budtender, ‘Hey, are you comfortable with me talking to you about this?’ is a great step forward, because everybody is different.”

Likewise, users should never feel shame about their cannabis use in the doctor’s office. Dr. Becky Kaufman Lynn, a gynecologist in Missouri, is not a cannabis user herself, but many of her patients have reported the drug’s benefits: “All of a sudden, around 2015, I had women coming into my office and saying, ‘I smoked marijuana and everything worked.’”

The doctor looked to medical literature for an explanation but discovered that because cannabis is still a Schedule I drug, clinical evidence is sparse. Although abundant anecdotal evidence can be found in online and real-life reports that cannabis improves sex, Lynn wanted to understand why. “Maybe that it lowers your anxiety if you smoke a little before sex. It slows down time, it increases your sensations, you smell more, you taste more. So there’s a variety of reasons why we think it makes sex better,” she says.

Many of the studies on cannabis and sex use rats. Yes, rats. “They measure all these different things, and what they found was that THC in normal or low doses had positive sexual side effects,” Lynn explains. One caveat: “When you use too much THC, studies show that it can have negative sexual side effects.”

Lynn recently used a questionnaire to ask women what happened when they used cannabis before sex. “We found that women who used marijuana before sex—and they were 99 percent smoking it—recorded an increase in overall sexual satisfaction, better orgasms and increasing desire,” she says. “In my study there was no change in lubrication and there was a decrease in pain.”

So will cannabis improve your orgasm? There’s only one way to find out.