Half of the people who use cannabis in Spain say they do it to unwind or take the edge off stress. A third use it to sleep. More than one in four use it to cope with anxiety or low mood. And yet the single most common reason remains the simplest one: having fun. No other illicit drug in Spain shows a motive profile so evenly split between pleasure and “it helps me with something”.
That picture comes from a peer-reviewed analysis published on 27 September 2026 in Archives of Sexual Behavior by researchers at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja and the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions, the statistics arm of Spain’s Ministry of Health. The team, led by Lucia Gallego-Deike and Hilario Blasco-Fontecilla, worked with responses from 6,399 people living in Spain who took part in the European Web Survey on Drugs, a questionnaire run by the EU’s drugs agency. The data were collected in 2024 and took two years to reach print. The paper’s headline topic is drug use in sexual contexts, but its tables contain the most granular public snapshot of why and where cannabis is consumed in Spain, and they read differently against the European backdrop than they do inside the country.
Key Takeaways
Among 6,399 respondents in Spain who had used an illicit drug in the past year, cannabis stood apart from every other substance in its mix of motives: 62.45% of its users consumed it for fun, but 49.73% used it to relax or reduce stress, 34.77% to improve sleep and 27.97% to manage anxiety or depression, a pattern shared only with heroin. Home was by far the main setting (79.83%), followed by public spaces (54.65%), the outdoors (51.1%) and music festivals (49.81%). Some 9.13% of cannabis users took it to enhance sex, and among the 874 respondents who used any drug for that purpose, cannabis was the most common substance in every gender group. Spain’s last-year cannabis prevalence of 12.6% sits well above the EU average of 8.7%, and the country accounted for three quarters of all cannabis plants seized in the EU in 2024. The survey is a self-selected online sample, not a representative one, and the paper’s authors say so plainly.
Cannabis use in Spain through a European instrument
The European Web Survey on Drugs (EWSD) is an online questionnaire that the European Union Drugs Agency runs every three years across roughly thirty countries. It is not designed to count how many people use drugs; household surveys do that. Its purpose is to describe how people who already use drugs behave: how often, how much, where, why, through which channels and at what price. Eligibility requires being over 18 and having used at least one of the following in the previous twelve months: cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy/MDMA, amphetamines, methamphetamine, heroin or a “new psychoactive substance”. The 225-item questionnaire takes about fifteen minutes. Spain has taken part since 2021, with the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions adapting the instrument locally.
In the 2024 wave, responses were collected in May and June. Most Spanish participants reached the survey through social-media posts or paid advertisements, and 6,399 valid, anonymous responses from residents of Spain made it into the dataset. That is a large sample by the standards of drug research, which is where the study’s statistical power comes from. It is also a sample of volunteers, and that shapes everything that follows.
For context, the paper cites Spanish government figures putting last-month illicit drug use at around 12.5% of the population aged 15 to 64, the annual social cost of illicit drugs at roughly 1.5 billion euros, and drug-related deaths in 2023 at 1,360.
Why people use cannabis: the motive changes the map
The paper’s first table lists reported purposes of use for each substance. Percentages are calculated over users of that particular drug, and respondents could tick several motives, so columns do not sum to 100.
Among cannabis users, 62.45% reported using it for fun. That is the top motive, but it is far below the figure for ecstasy (73.71%) and roughly level with powder cocaine (61.54%). What separates cannabis from everything else is the second row: 49.73% used it to relax or reduce stress, against 8.11% of cocaine users and 3.32% of MDMA users. A further 34.77% used cannabis to sleep better, 27.97% to manage symptoms of anxiety or depression, 12.59% to reduce pain and 6.06% for spiritual reasons. Socialising was cited by 22.57%, curiosity by 9.87% and improving performance at work, school or sport by 7.8%.
Then there is the awkward number. Some 22.36% of cannabis users said they consumed because of dependence. That is in the same range as heroin (27.40%), and the authors draw out the contrast: cannabis is widely perceived as a low-risk, low-harm substance, heroin is not, yet comparable shares of each drug’s users describe their use as driven by dependence. The caveat matters here. “Dependence” in this survey is a self-reported motive, not a clinical diagnosis, and the questionnaire did not ask about cannabis potency, which would be relevant to interpreting it.
The overall shape echoes what other countries’ surveys show. A US national survey on why Americans really use cannabis found the same blurred line between recreational use and use “for” sleep, pain or anxiety, a line that legal categories draw far more sharply than users do.
Where cannabis is consumed: home, street, festival
The second table asks about settings. Again, respondents could select more than one.
79.83% of cannabis users consumed at home. No other substance comes close in the domestic setting except heroin (60.27%). But cannabis is also the drug most often consumed outside: 54.65% used it in public spaces, 51.1% in nature, 49.81% at music festivals or parties and 34.90% in clubs or bars. Some 16.47% used it in a car, 7.76% at school or college, 6.58% at work and 11.97% in a drug consumption room.
That 54.65% figure for public spaces deserves a legal footnote for readers outside Spain. Private consumption by adults is not penalised in Spain, but consumption or possession in public places, streets or public establishments is a serious administrative offence under Article 36.16 of the Citizen Security Law, Ley Orgánica 4/2015, carrying fines of 601 to 30,000 euros. The government’s own National Plan on Drugs portal makes clear that possession alone is not a crime unless intended for trafficking; the penalty is a fine, not a record. In plain terms, more than half of surveyed cannabis users report consuming exactly where the law fines them.
The authors connect the prominence of festivals with wastewater studies that detect spikes in drug residues, mostly stimulants, during rap, house, dance, pop and rock events. Across that literature, cannabis and MDMA are consistently the illicit drugs most present at festivals.
Cannabis and sex: the finding that named the study
The paper’s declared subject is “sexualised drug use”, meaning the deliberate use of a substance to intensify or facilitate sex. Of the 6,399 respondents, 874 (13.66%) reported doing so at least once in the past year. Men outnumbered women roughly two to one in that group.
Cannabis plays an odd role here. Among all cannabis users, only 9.13% used it to enhance sex, similar to MDMA (8.14%) and somewhat below methamphetamine (10.35%), which in relative terms is the drug most tied to this purpose. But turn the question around and ask which substance people who use drugs for sex actually reach for, and cannabis wins clearly: 50.34% of that group used it, against 31.46% who used ecstasy and 19.34% who used powder cocaine. The figure is nearly identical for cis men (50.21%), cis women (52.69%) and transgender or non-binary respondents (46.67%). The authors read this as availability rather than pharmacology: cannabis is simply the most widely used illicit drug, so it shows up in every context.
Most people who used drugs for sex stuck to a single substance: 712 people (81.46%). Another 113 (12.93%) used two or more, not necessarily at the same time, and five or more was rare.
Chemsex is a distinct category: prolonged sexual sessions, often in groups, with stimulants such as methamphetamine, GHB/GBL or mephedrone, historically documented among men who have sex with men. Only 206 respondents (3.31%) reported using any substance at a chemsex party in the past year: 170 cis men (81.33%), 22 cis women (10.53%) and 14 transgender or non-binary people (6.70%). That nearly one in five participants in that group was not a cis man is, for the authors, a sign the phenomenon is spreading beyond its classic profile. Within chemsex settings, 34.76% had used cannabis and 10.48% CBD or low-THC products; among transgender and non-binary participants the cannabis figure rose to 66.67%, though with a very wide confidence interval because the group numbers just 14 people.
The finding fits earlier Spanish work. A Ministry of Health technical document on chemsex had already linked injected stimulant use to these practices, and a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis puts pooled prevalence of sexualised drug use among men who have sex with men at 25%. A study at a Madrid sexual-health clinic found that 33.8% of attendees reported sexualised drug use, with poppers and cannabis the most cited substances. Across all of it, cannabis is the “light” drug that is almost always in the room.
Who answered: the sample profile
The 6,399 participants had a mean age of 31.42 years. 62.65% were assigned male at birth and 36.11% female; 61.90% identified as cis men, 34.41% as cis women and 2.50% as transgender or non-binary. Just over half were in full-time employment (55.91%) and 45.66% had higher education. 41.57% lived in a city, 32.69% in a town and 19.90% in a village or the countryside.
Those who used drugs for sex were slightly younger (30.75 versus 31.52 years), more often male and slightly more likely to be transgender or non-binary (3.66% versus 2.38%). On living situation, income, education and residence type, there were no statistically meaningful differences between the two groups, which matches the inconsistent findings on those variables across the wider literature.
How Spain compares with the rest of Europe
The EWSD describes texture; official population surveys describe scale. Spain’s household survey EDADES, run by the Ministry of Health with a sample designed to represent everyone aged 15 to 64, is the source for the scale. According to the EDADES 2024 executive report, 43.7% of Spaniards aged 15 to 64 have tried cannabis, 12.6% used it in the last twelve months and 10.5% in the last thirty days. Daily use fell from 2.8% in 2022 to 2.5% in 2024, and prevalence peaks between 15 and 24, where 25.8% of young men and 17.7% of young women used cannabis in the past year.
Set those numbers against the European Drug Report 2026 and Spain stands out. Across the EU, an estimated 8.7% of adults aged 15 to 64, about 25 million people, used cannabis in the last year; among 15- to 34-year-olds the figure is 15.3%, and 1.6% of adults use daily or almost daily. Spain’s 12.6% is roughly half again the EU average. The supply side is just as lopsided: in 2024 Spain accounted for 75% of all cannabis plants seized in the European Union, and its resin seizures, at 206 tonnes, remained the largest in Europe even after a 45% drop from 2023.
Why does that matter for reading the EWSD tables? Because it means Spain’s cannabis users are not a marginal population, and their motives, half of them citing relaxation, a third sleep, a quarter anxiety or depression, describe a sizeable slice of a country that is also Europe’s main cannabis-producing and transit territory. The comparison with other regulatory experiments is instructive. In Germany, a study of cannabis use after partial legalisation found the legal change altered patterns more than headcounts, and California’s seven years of legal retail told a similar story: use did not explode, but its shape changed. Spain has done none of that; it tolerates private use and cannabis social clubs while fining public consumption and prohibiting sale. The EWSD data show what that middle path looks like from the user’s side.
What the study cannot say
The authors are candid about the limits, and they are substantial. First, the design is cross-sectional, a single frame from 2024. It cannot establish causation or trend. Whether someone uses cannabis because they sleep badly or sleeps badly because they use cannabis is not something the questionnaire can answer; it only records that the person links the two.
Second, the sample. Recruitment ran mainly through social media, and participation was voluntary and anonymous. The resulting self-selection bias cannot be corrected after the fact. People with more problematic use, more socially isolated people, and people who simply do not fill in surveys are probably underrepresented.
Third, everything rests on self-report. There was no biological verification, no way to check quantities or frequencies, and in a stigmatised domain underreporting is expected. The survey also did not distinguish which specific new psychoactive substances were being used, and it did not ask about cannabis potency. In the smallest subgroups, the 22 women or 14 transgender and non-binary respondents in the chemsex section, confidence intervals are so wide that percentages should be read as direction, not measurement.
With all of that said, the study offers something official statistics do not: a systematic breakdown of motives, settings and routes of use in a large Spanish sample, in an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. It joins a small but growing body of Spanish clinical and survey data, such as the retrospective study of cannabidiol in adult epilepsy patients from Málaga and Jaén, that lets the country’s cannabis picture be drawn from local evidence rather than imported assumptions.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. They describe 6,399 people who had used an illicit drug in the previous year and chose to answer an online questionnaire. For population-level figures, Spain’s representative household survey EDADES put last-year cannabis use at 12.6% of people aged 15 to 64 in 2024, against an EU average of 8.7%.
Both at once. Fun was the most cited motive among cannabis users (62.45%), but nearly half used it to relax (49.73%), a third to sleep (34.77%) and more than a quarter to manage anxiety or depression (27.97%). Respondents could select several motives, so the categories overlap.
Not in the way visitors from US legal states or from Germany might assume. Adult consumption in private is not penalised, and cannabis social clubs operate in a legal grey zone tolerated to varying degrees by region. But consuming or carrying cannabis in public places, streets or public establishments is a serious administrative offence under Article 36.16 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015, with fines from 601 to 30,000 euros, usually imposed at the minimum. Cultivation for sale, selling and any form of trafficking are criminal offences under the Penal Code. There are no licensed retail shops. Medical cannabis preparations are governed separately by the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices and are not what this survey measured. Rules change and enforcement depends on circumstances, so anyone with a concrete question should consult a qualified professional.
Chemsex refers to the use of stimulants, chiefly methamphetamine, GHB/GBL and mephedrone, during prolonged sexual sessions, often in groups, historically described among men who have sex with men. In this study only 3.31% of respondents had taken part. Cannabis appears in those settings, used by 34.76% of attendees, but it is not a chemsex drug in the strict sense; its presence reflects that it is the most common illicit substance in almost any context.
Legal Disclaimer
This article is for general information and journalistic purposes only. It summarises a published scientific study and official survey data and does not constitute medical, psychological or legal advice. Cannabis is a controlled substance in Spain and in most jurisdictions; the law differs between countries and regions and changes over time. Nothing here should be read as encouragement to use any substance or as a complete description of the legal position in any specific situation. For questions about health or about the law that applies to you, consult a qualified healthcare or legal professional.
