Aphrodisiac' effect part of meth's deceptive charm

Doctors say for a short while meth can boost sexual appetite and performance - in a way that's much stronger cocaine.

Doctors and government officials don't like to talk much about it, but there's an obvious reason people get hooked on methamphetamine: sex.

The drug eventually destroys the sex drive, but doctors say for a short while meth can boost sexual appetite and performance - in a way that's much stronger than stimulants such as cocaine. Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Laymon said he has interviewed hundreds of meth users, and a startling number - men and women - say the drug enhances sexual performance and desire.

"Who wouldn't want to use it? You lose weight and you have great sex," Laymon said recently at a meeting of Tennessee's meth task force.

But Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who attended the meeting, winced when Laymon called the drug an "aphrodisiac" and said his description "just set us back quite a ways here."

For obvious reasons, government officials, facing an epidemic of meth abuse in rural Appalachia, want to focus on the misery meth causes and not its aphrodisiac effect.

But Dr. Mary Holley, an obstetrician who runs a Mothers Against Methamphetamine ministry in Albertville, Ala., said sex is the "No. 1 reason" people use the meth. "When you first start using this stuff it makes you want sex all the time," Holley said. The effect doesn't last long. "After you have been using it about 6 months or so you can't have sex unless you are high," Holley said. "After you have been using it a little bit longer you can't have sex even when you're high. Nothing happens. It doesn't work."

An addiction specialist with the Council for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services in Chattanooga, Dr. John Standridge, said meth and other stimulants initially "rev up the dopamine nervous system in the brain. They rev it up and burn it out."

Meth users can never recapture the feeling of that initial high, but they keep trying in "a vicious downward spiral," Standridge said. "It's the same way with sexual arousal. At first, meth users report greater sexual arousal and prolonged stamina, and if they are of the right personality they get into compulsive sexuality. That leads to an inhibited sexual desire." Its sex appeal is part of why meth is so hard to fight.

Meth is also easy to make. It's typically cooked from ordinary household products and cold tablets such as Sudafed that contain ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. Holley, who has interviewed men and women addicted to the methamphetamine, said it stimulates the "pleasure center" in the brain. "Its technical name is 'nucleus accumbens' and that is where everything feels good, including sex. That's where music sounds good and a plate of food tastes good. Everything that feels good feels good in the nucleus accumbens," said Holley, whose 22-year-old brother was an addict who killed himself. "Methamphetamine makes a direct hit on the nucleus accumbens with its favorite chemical, dopamine," she said.

"The effect of an IV hit of methamphetamine is the equivalent of 10 orgasms all on top of each other lasting for 30 minutes to an hour, with a feeling of arousal that lasts for another day and a half." Holley said the body "doesn't have enzymes to metabolize this stuff, so the dopamine high lasts for 20 hours. That is 10 times longer than cocaine."

Holley said meth abusers can recover their ability to have sex "if you quit it soon enough. If you have done too much damage to the nucleus accumbens it doesn't always come back." "It's vicious," she said. "It gives you a hallucination of being in control, power confidence, intelligence and endurance. You feel great but it is all a hallucination. You think you chose to use it again, but you had a desire to do it again and you couldn't control that desire. You didn't choose meth. It chose you."