Last week on October 17th, Canada became the largest weed market in the world when its legal marijuana policy became federally enacted. Canadians celebrated accordingly. They hosted wake-and-bake parties, passed joints while waiting in line for the 111 weed stores that debuted later that day, rolled blunts and cleared bongs and otherwise rejoiced in this historic public policy milestone.
Then they went home and fapped to porn featuring other people getting high.
In fact, according to Pornnub Insights, searches for cannabis-related terms among Canadian porn watchers were 206 percent higher than average on the 17th. “Those higher searches included terms such as ‘smoking weed,’ ‘weed sex,’ ‘horny weed,’ ‘girls smoking weed,’ ‘ganja girls’ and ‘smoking weed blowjob,’” Pornhub finds. “Several searches with ‘420’ topped the charts, but perhaps Canadians will now regard ‘1017’ as an equally important number.”
Some less popular weed-related Pornhub searches deserve recognition, too — especially “420 baddie,” “lesbians smoking weed,” “marijuana masturbation” and the very literal “smoking marijuana.”
The data shows these searches were most popular among Canadians on the East Coast and young Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34. “Canada’s East Coast was the first to legally light up after midnight, so it seems fitting that they are historically more likely to search for cannabis-related terms when compared to the rest of the country,” Pornhub reports. “Newfoundland & Labrador ranks first, followed by New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.”
The porn giant adds, “When compared to the rest of the world, Canadians are 224 percent more likely to search for cannabis-related terms, making them fourth worldwide behind Kenya, Switzerland and South Africa, but just ahead of their American neighbors to the South.”
Why do Kenya, Switzerland and South Africa top this list? I wish I knew. While the private use of marijuana is legal in South Africa, weed is still completely illegal in Kenya and remains illegal in Sweden, though the possession of marijuana has been decriminalized there since 1999.
So maybe weed porn just adds to the fantasy of being able to smoke it totally free of regulations?
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
