Several correspondents mentioned that marijuana helps them to

In making love when you're stoned, you tend to focus on smaller areas of sensation and thus magnify the importance of each one. I've explored a lover, literally square inch by square inch, and have found it unbelievably sensual. Making love while stoned is a new experience each time, with a different quality on each occasion. Also, being stoned facilitates the removal of headtripping during sex, getting you down to pure experience with a minimum of intellectualization .

    A Chicago woman in her mid-forties describes a particularly pleasant example of how marijuana helps her to concentrate during sex:

The thirty- to sixty-minute period of lovemaking seems timeless, more like three or four hours. My capacity to focus was greatly heightened. I remember having no body parts except those directly connected to arousal. That is, when kissing, I was aware only of my mouth; when he fondled my breasts, I was only breasts, and later—only genitals. The foci shifted frequently and I was able to concentrate on one sensation at a time, leaving out all others, including hearing, smelling, even touching and tasting in the service of the intensity of being touched.

    It should not be surprising, then, that marijuana enhances sexual activity, since it has been known to lower inhibitions, slow down the appearance of passing time, induce relaxation, make people more aware of their senses, and help them to focus on the present moment. As a Chicago lawyer put it, "Sex, ah yes. This is what pot was made for."
    Being high allows many users to understand what some sex researchers have been insisting upon for years: that the sexual act should be regarded as something more than a mere stepladder to orgasmic release. Not surprisingly, many smokers report that the prime effect of marijuana on sex is to de-emphasize the orgasm as the central event, allowing them to enjoy more general experiences of physical pleasure and emotional intimacy. This relaxation frequently serves both to delay and to heighten the orgasm, precisely because it has been removed as the focal point of the encounter.
    At the same time, the new standards regarding premarital sex during the sixties and seventies have allowed marijuana to fit in very conveniently with the image of socially sanctioned seduction scenes found in the popular men's magazines. "If you went out with a girl who would smoke with you," recalls a man who is now married with children, "you could be pretty sure she'd sleep with you too. In fact, you could pretty much count on it, and if it didn't happen, you could consider yourself taken advantage of."
    Predictably, the association between marijuana and seduction has led to concern on the part of some women, who find themselves suspicious of men who show a strong interest in marijuana and other recreational drugs during the early stages of courtship. As one woman put it, "I like to smoke as much as the next person, but many men use dope as one more tool against a girl to get her pants off."
    Marijuana is especially useful to people who show a reluctance to let go, since it serves to sanction their right to behave with more abandon. Indeed, both marijuana and sex depend to a large extent on the individual's ability and willingness to enter into a different form of reality without fear. Each person makes certain compromises around the issue of control, letting go to a personally tolerable level of comfort and security. An interesting example is Carol, the psychiatric nurse, who finds that marijuana heightens her sense of abandon—but also increases her insecurities:

Sometimes when I'm very turned on to the person I'm with, I've had the sense of riding a magic carpet. I've told the guy, but he really doesn't understand what it is I'm saying. I really feel like I'm on a plane ride, a very controlled whisking away. It's an abandonment, but one which I feel good about. Actually, it's not so much like a plane ride, because I don't feel anything under me; the visual image is that of a soaring magic carpet. When I'm stoned, I can really get into that. It's happened to me several times. It's strictly a stoned experience. I don't ride on carpets that way unless I'm stoned.

    But for Carol, there is another, less pleasant side to having sex while she is high, about which she is articulate and frank. Marijuana may enhance the physical pleasures of sex, but in her case, it also enhances certain emotional realities to the point where there is a stiff price to pay:

Sexually, there's an expansion when I'm stoned, a slowing down, especially of the things I wouldn't want rushed. Just the holding onto someone—that's slowed down for me. I guess I have a real fear of these experiences slipping away from me too quickly. I have a hard time with separations of any sort, even if they're only momentary.
    For example, when I'm stoned, and the guy I'm with gets up to go to the bathroom, and I'm sitting on the bed, all of a sudden I'll get the idea and say to myself, "Hey, you've just hallucinated the fact that he's here. But he's not here. He's not in the bathroom. He's gone. This is the reality, aloneness is the reality, being totally alone in the world."
    I've had that experience several times. And then I'll hear the toilet flush, and I'll think someone must be here, and then he'll come back in, and I have to ground myself to the idea that he's here, and I'll say, "I'm glad I'm not hallucinating, you're really here, aren't you?" And then he'll look at me—I don't fill in the gaps for him—and I don't tell him I've hallucinated while he was gone.
    It's a weird thing, and it happens a lot. If I'm the one who gets up, I'll have the sense that when I return, there will be nobody there.