Senses can become heightened, and sometimes they are heightened on their own. Other times it is YOU are heightening your senses, and smoking weed is a surefire way of doing that. One of the plain-as-day realities of consuming cannabis is that much of the time it makes pretty much everything more pleasurable. Can that mean going through an entire bag of potato chips when you’d only crunch through a handful of them if you weren’t lit? Absolutely. But our answer to does smoking weed cause acne is that it is more likely connected to what you’re inclined to eat when you’re high. 

The active ingredient in cannabis that’s absorbed into your bloodstream is a cannabinoid called THC. That means it’s the only constituent in the flower that would have the ability to make its way to sebaceous glands in the skin. Those glands are the ones that become active and provide too much sebum – the ‘oil’ that clogs the pores and starts the process of developing acne. The pores get clogged first, and then the bacteria build up. But if we’re looking at does smoking weed cause acne then it’s a no – there’s not a whole lot to the marijuana and acne connection.  

In the literal and direct sense at least. There are roundabout connections to can smoking weed cause acne, and that’s why we talked about crushing a whole bag of potato chips at the start here. It could also apply to eating an entire grease wheel rather than just a slice or two. Craving foods that are high in sugar, fat, and refined carbs is standard stuff if you’re a cannabis aficionado, and if that’s you then you likely refer to those cravings as ‘munchies’ too.  Eating this way can cause acne, but it’s not cannabis itself. 

Glucose Glut and Hormones  

Eating more because of cannabis use can be a different factor in does smoking weed cause acne, and specifically with the way eating more will push up blood sugar levels. The major risk with this will be insulin resistance or Type 2 diabetes if that’s a frequent occurrence. But a glut of blood glucose and long-term elevated blood sugar levels does increase inflammation in the skin, and skin that is inflamed will produce more sebum as part of the response.  

The last thing to say around does smoking weed cause acne is that people who will be more at risk of sebum explosions will be teenagers. That goes along with the many other very valid reasons why people should not start using cannabis until they are of the legal age to do so. And it is better to ingest it by other means and not smoke it. You’ll be inhaling hydrocarbons into your lungs, even though not to nearly the same extent that you would be with tobacco. Only dinosaurs smoke cigarettes nowadays anyways.