Whoopi Goldberg On Why Women Should Use Cannabis

Whoopi Goldberg thought her journey with cannabis was over when she gave up smoking. Then, her daughter gave her her first vape pen and she began, she writes in a recent opEd for the Orange County Register, “to see marijuana as the medicine it is.”

Goldberg soon joined the cannabis industry in order to do something she now feels is essential to the cannabis movement: create products as a woman for women. Her brand, Whoopi & Maya, founded with cannabis industry veteran Maya Elisabeth, makes cannabis-derived Epsom salts, menstrual relief rubs, and tinctures, among other products, for menstrual pain.

The cannabis plant, Goldberg writes, is “uniquely tailored to helping with everyday women’s health issues” including cramps, acne, and stress.

This is nothing new. In fact, women have been ingesting cannabis and using it topically for millennia to ease the pain of menstruation, pregnancy and even losing their virginities. Diodorus Siculus, the Greek Historian from the 1st Century B.C., recorded how women in Ancient Egypt used cannabis to help with sorrow and pain, while according to cannabis scholar Michael Aldrich, men and women drank cannabis before intercourse in ancient India.

Somehow though, Goldberg writes, in 2018 America, “many women still believe that legalized cannabis products are all about getting stoned or high” when “nothing can be further from the truth.”

It doesn’t help that many of the cannabis products—including Whoopi & Maya, which is sold in California and Colorado—are only available at dispensaries in legal states. That’s changing, however, as a growing number of states legalize and companies like Foria create CBD-only products which can be sold nationwide.

But that won’t matter, writes Goldberg, if women don’t know about “the specific and tremendous benefits” of the cannabis plant. It’s now become her mission to ensure that that changes.