Back Page: Sexuality, Drugs and Alcohol. Is Rehabilitation Possible?

A good party cannot be short on anything. In the Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner’s mansion, you can imagine Roman bacchanals, or the barbarian invasions, or when in Caligula’s court the leftovers of drugs, alcohol and the dignity of the slaves were finished off.

Ex-playmate Jill Ann Spaulding tells all in her autobiography about Hefner, who at 78 feels ageless and currently lives with “12 slave bunnies” who he keeps in his mansion of half-naked Barbies.

░ Viagra promises

The Asterix potion used by the Playboy grandpa is called sildenafil citrate, and was patented in 1996 under the name Viagra by the Pzifer laboratories.

After its dark beginning, during which deadly properties were attributed to it, and every heart attack or collapse during sex was interpreted as divine punishment on old men and sex addicts in general, Viagra overcame the religious fears of people who assured that the damn drug led to promiscuity and vice and one could even end up blind, if not suddenly dead.

On the other hand, there were those who believed in the “magical pill” or “happiness pill”, which promised a drug of unimaginable pleasures, the dawn of a new age of supermen and love gods: the oldest men would rise again in their last years, and even the most apathetic lose control.

But the initial fantasies ended with the embarrassment of asking for the happy pill in line at the pharmacy, and nowadays, Olympic or satanic language is not used to talk about Viagra. Perhaps there will still be a warning about its use, for example: can it create addiction? Until now, there is no pharmacological evidence of that. We can find those who ask how many can I take a day, visibly satisfied with his purchase. But, to blame Viagra for dependence would be like killing the messenger?

░ Sex Addicts

“We admit that we were weak before lust, that our lives became unmanageable”, says the first of the principles proposed by the Decalogue of “Sexoholics Anonymous”, a brotherhood of men and women addicted to sex.

When Michael Douglas confessed publicly his own addiction to sex and entered a specialized clinic, those who did not smile, hurried to include themselves cynically in the same group as the famous actor.

The treatment of the problem has matured since then, and specialized clinics and associations have acquired certain relevance. Sexual compulsive conduct is diagnosed and treated as any other addiction, like drugs and alcohol, needing rehabilitation in these centers. “For sex addiction, contrary to nymphomania, frequency is not important, but rather the psychic malaise that derivates from the lack of self-control”, says the psychologist and sexologist Pilar Cristobal. That malaise has served to describe sex withdrawal symptoms, which affect people who do not satisfy the craving for consumption.

Sex, as a product, has an uncontrollable presence nowadays: would addiction be relevant as an explanation of that huge phenomenon? After increasing the supply of sex, the objective is to find new varieties of sex, trying every type of solution and extreme motivation:

In the mid 30s, the characters of Private life, by Josep Maria de Sagarra, went to Barcelona’s ‘Chinatown’ to look for sex and cocaine. Nowadays, the Internet shows new alternatives for sex daily, sometimes difficult to understand if not considered from a pathological perspective.

░ Drugs to amplify sex

Much has been said about the miraculous effects of some drugs in bed. About how you can amplify sexual pleasure under the effects of some hypnotic drugs or after smoking a joint. As far as alcohol, it has actually become an essential part of courtship. “It’s the lack of love which fills the pubs”, says Lichis (‘La Cabra Mecánica’ rock band).

Alcohol and drugs, like marijuana or hashish, as desinhibitors, can help audacity and to overcome the embarrassment of first contacts. Nevertheless, in the long run, the art of seduction with marijuana, a dazed look and drowsiness, are not very effective; the same as whisky breath, a tired look and slurred speech from boozing.

Other gadgets, unused by innocents, would actually be more recommended, for example, spinning a bottle with youngsters sitting in a circle to start a round of kisses. The author of Women said: “If you want to drink, drink, but if you want to have sex, stop drinking”. Charles Bukowski, writer, drinker and womanizer.

Stimulants of the nervous system (amphetamines, ecstasy or cocaine) are drugs with the greatest sexual prestige. The reasons for this are varied, but the expected result is always the same: to become a sex machine of proportions unknown to the common man.

And along these lines, we have also known the miraculous effects of the lack of oxygen in the brain at the moment of the orgasm, for example, some people stick their heads into a plastic bag, and some have been found asphyxiated in public toilets or Underground stations.

In addition to the damage caused by drugs and alcohol on the central nervous system, which affects stimulation and erectile functions, the effects are a substitute of sex, and not a complement. Finally, drug use causes a lack of sexual appetite, if not sexual impotence. Being drug and alcohol rehabilitation the only way to recover a normal life.

The case of heroin is especially representative. Often compared with an orgasm, users argue that the sensations of heroin are more intense and pleasurable than the sensations of sex, which they finally refuse. “Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it”, states the protagonist of Trainspotting. Plasma analysis of heroin users shows very low testosterone levels in blood.

░ The last sexual revolution

“Make love and not war” became a slogan of the sexual revolution of the 60s. Sex and drug taboos disappeared simultaneously. Literature, music, cinema showed the new social trends.

But the sexual liberation seemed definitively extinguished in the 80s among the darkness of a devastating threat: the HIV or AIDS virus. They said the epidemic was divine punishment to reprimand the excesses of the sexual revolution. Ignorance and the fear of infection brought an atmosphere of medieval plague against which there was not salvation aside from the abstinence and penitence to the most advanced societies of the 20th Century.

Time went by, investigations progressed and the first remedies and precautions appeared. At the same time the number of deaths by AIDS lowered (although it has been a privilege just of the ‘first world’) sex was free of blame and fatality, starting what could be called the last sexual revolution.

Then and now we find the presence of drugs, not a real incentive of sex, but of society in general. The search for pleasure is something natural for human beings and it is also compulsive, a permanent dissatisfaction that forces us to constantly ask for more. In that way drug and alcohol rehabilitation must prepare patients to look for pleasure with non-damging external agents.

Nowadays, the last sexual revolution has found a lifestyle that promotes saturation and anxiety. The laws of supply and demand, insatiable consumption and competition have transferred their rules to the understanding sex. The last sexual revolution has found sex already invented, but at the same time, it is necessary to offer something else, to continue selling. Therefore to reinvent sex, somebody has remembered drugs.

OTHERS
░ Sport and Drugs
░ Music and Drugs
░ Cinema and Drugs
░ Sexuality and Drugs
░ Domestic violence and drugs

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