Why Smoking Marijuana Makes Your Mouth Dry – Health Digest

Saliva serves a purpose when it comes to our overall dental health. For starters, saliva keeps your mouth comfortably moist, per WebMD. It also plays a role in how you digest your food: the enzymes in it help break down food, and the moisture it creates helps food go down easily. Saliva also prevents bad breath, and the proteins and minerals in saliva protect your mouth against gum disease. 

Cotton mouth caused by cannabis smoking can hamper all of these useful benefits of saliva, which essentially means that you’re more at risk of developing oral health issues (especially if you are a regular marijuana user). You become more susceptible to cavities, bad breath, and periodontal and gum disease. As a more immediate side effect, you may have already noticed that having a dry mouth might make it difficult for you to talk, as well as taste, chew, and swallow food.  

Having cotton mouth is certainly not pleasant. Fortunately, there are things you can do to prevent it when smoking cannabis, like hydrating sufficiently, chewing on unsweetened gum, and using things like moisturizing mouth sprays. However, dry mouth and resulting gum diseases are not all that smoking marijuana does to your oral health. There’s more, like when the tannins in cannabis lead to teeth staining, per Delta Dental. The yellowing or browning teeth you’re starting to see after regular cannabis use? Yep, that’s a result of the weed.