The Women’s Cannabis Project will make its European policy debut later this month with a presentation at CannaTrade 2026 in Zurich focused on women’s health and medical marijuana.
The presentation, scheduled for May 31, will introduce A Policy Framework for Women’s Health in Europe: A Model for Medical Cannabis Policy, a new framework the group says is designed to help integrate women-specific health conditions into medical marijuana policy.
The presentation will be delivered by Eliane Eggler, chair of the European Advisory Council for the Women’s Cannabis Project. The organization will also host a booth throughout the three-day conference.
The Women’s Cannabis Project, the policy arm of the Female Orgasm Research Institute, says the framework grew out of years of advocacy in the United States, including a January 2025 decision in Illinois that added four women-specific conditions to the state’s medical marijuana program: endometriosis, ovarian cysts, uterine fibroids and female orgasmic disorder.
According to the group, those approvals marked a shift away from medical marijuana policy that focuses almost entirely on pain or broad symptom management, and toward a model that better recognizes conditions affecting women’s health, function and quality of life.
The Zurich presentation will focus in part on female orgasmic disorder, which the organization says is common, has limited treatment options and has no approved pharmacologic therapies. The framework explores whether some cases of the condition may involve difficulty accessing the internal neurological and physiological conditions needed for orgasmic function, and whether marijuana may help support those conditions.
“What we began to observe in our research were women with histories of sexual trauma, PTSD, and gynecological cancer treatment or surgeries reporting improved access to orgasm with cannabis use in ways that were not fully explainable through traditional sexual response models,” said Suzanne Mulvehill, PhD, founder and executive director of the Female Orgasm Research Institute. “Rather than asking only ‘What is wrong?’, the framework begins asking a different question: ‘What neuroregulatory conditions are necessary for orgasmic function to become possible?’”
Kelsey Engvik, director of the Women’s Cannabis Project, said the organization’s work has grown from individual state-level efforts into a broader policy model.
“This work evolved from advocacy into results,” Engvik said. “What emerged was a larger framework for how women’s health can be recognized, measured, researched, and integrated into medical cannabis policy globally.”
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