Do you take drugs when you have sex? If you do, then in addition to having sex with your partner(s), pharmacologically you are also having sex with the drug you take. Sex is a drug! The biological chemistry of sex is a lot like that of psychoactive drugs. So when you have sex on drugs, you are having sex with that drug. Such drug interaction can be problematic... but it does not have to be.
Alcohol and sex
Most of us are familiar with alcohol rendering people incapable of performing sexually. In fact, alcohol: a depressant, anesthetic, hypnogogic, is perhaps the least useful in extending erotic sensuality. Every year studies are done of college student drinking practices. The outcome is always the same: a little alcohol (2 drinks in one hour) just prior to sex increases performance, pleasure and satisfaction. Over two drinks in an hour and sexual deficits begin to occur from prolonging the time it takes to reach orgasm, to an inability to have an orgasm, to the inability to get an erection.
Alcohol, in fact, is a depressant and is the least capable of doing what it is a sex drug should do: i.e. amplify sensuality and increase orgasmic potential. What it does do is disinhibit people. It "loosens-them-up". This means that they no longer feel performance anxiety or sexual guilt. Performance anxiety and sexual guilt have their own culturally conditioned chemistry. Alcohol, an anesthetic, anesthetizes the bodies response to guilt and anxiety rendering people less inhibited before it renders them desensitized and eventually unconscious.
Psychedelics and sex
The best drugs for sex are again the psychedelics. We want to be totally awake and aware when we are having sex and totally relaxed when enjoying orgasm: in fact we must be physiologically relaxed to have an orgasm. Guilt and performance anxiety need to be dealt with before taking any drugs. Using drugs to mask these problems will only lead to more problems and specifically more drug taking and the possibility of addiction.
At the very least the psychedelics are the most benign of the psychoactive drugs used for sex. That is why we don't hear of LSD addicts. But even on the psychedelics, someone can still have a "bad trip". So you want to be knowledgeable about these drugs before you take them and if you are taking them for the first time you want to have a guide.
Are drugs necessary for sex?
There are people who say: "I don't need drugs for sex—I do it naturally." Good for you. This is not written for you. There is good reason to take drugs with sex: to extend our natural ability to feel pleasure. If you have been raised in a culture in which pleasure is forbidden, drugs are not going to solve your problem. Your problem is guilt and you will need to do a re-evaluation of your cultural beliefs. Much of psychotherapy does this type of cultural analysis.
(Here is a "figure/ground" example of just how much we take our culture for granted: the word psychotherapist which we have read and/or written many times over is also psycho-the-rapist.)
What is proposed here is that a thrilling-fulfilling and enjoyable sex life is not based on drug taking but on cultural competency, i.e. the ability to sociologically analyze and understand one's own cultural taboos about sex.
Sex guilt
Historically, America has been a puritan culture where sex was taboo accept for procreative monogamy and, even then, puritan men and women (according to their own words) would take their sexual pleasure only absentmindedly with their attention fixed on God. Thoughts could be impure and thinking, too, could be a sin. Such was (is) our American heritage. The American world view of Puritanism has been tempered with secularization, but American institutions still perpetuate a social psychology where sin is now pathology and euphoria symptomatic.
There is still a tendency for people to feel at least somewhat uncomfortable when confronting sexuality in America. Using a drug to alleviate this problem is also very American. It also is very puritan in that it is utilitarian and practical. It's quick. It's easy! It's a solution! And it is the solution that most Americans use to medicate their sex guilt. It, too, is iatrogenic!
The physiology of sex
Since the 1970's a lot about the physiology of sex has been uncovered. We know that during sexual arousal the sympathetic nervous system is "turned-on". This is the same nervous system that is activated during the "flight or fight" response when we feel the adrenaline rush, and it is the same system activated by cocaine or the amphetamines.
So if you use cocaine or the amphetamines you are adding to the ability of that system to "turn-on". Your body thanks you for the help in that it will provide you with an excess of orgasmic pleasure. However, if you do too much, it will hinder your body in its sexual performance. And you could overdose. The contingencies of sexual drugging are all related to dose and where you want to go sexually with that dose. In other words doing sex with drugs requires careful-intimate planning. Planning, in turn, requires freedom from guilt... and so, too, does orgasm.
For those of us who have had orgasms to die for, "petit morts", life seems to be what occurs between any two of them. And in this sense: life can be beautiful! The more we learn about the unique physiology of orgasm, the more miraculous it seems to become.
As stated before, sexual arousal employs that part of the nervous system that energizes, stimulates and excites one to action: the sympathetic nervous system. At its extreme it can overload and burn out: cardiac arrest from a cocaine overdose during sex is not that uncommon. Even without drugs added, the sympathetic system at the height of sexual arousal is on "full tilt"... and then SUDDENLY ORGASM!
For orgasm to happen a tremendous chemo-electrical engineering problem must be solved which our bodies seem to have miraculously accomplished. A switch must be made from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system.
The parasympathetic nervous system is generally that system which "turns-on" while we are asleep or relaxing, digesting our food, or going to the bathroom, or in deep meditation. It is the system on which the barbiturates work. It is exactly the opposite of the high energy sympathetic system. It would metaphorically be the equivalent of a jet plane traveling close to the speed of sound coming to a complete stop. If this actually happened would the plane have an orgasm?
The miracle of sex
People have orgasms every day and this fantastic physiological accomplishment happens without a second thought. It's perfectly natural and yet the molecular biology that accompanies this miracle of biological engineering is taken for granted. Perhaps we could learn much more about the universe from our own biological functions and more specifically from the molecular biology of the orgasm.
What we should learn about sex with drugs is that when we have sex we are already in a drug state and so dosage becomes all that more important. Sex with drugs definitely means: CONTROLLED DRUG USE. Too much stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and we will not be able to make the switch. We will not be able to achieve an orgasm. We won't be able to cum... and cumming is a big thing. It's miraculous!
Guidelines for sex with drugs
So how should we plan for our next sex with drugs experience? With a guide... and be guided by these simple guidelines:
So much of what we know about sex is cloaked in ignorance and hypocrisy...
Remember Dr. Jocelyn Elders, the first black female surgeon general fired by a President for saying that if more teenagers masturbated, there would be less teenage violence? She stated the truth about the relationship between repressed sexuality and violence. President Clinton did not like the possible political innuendo. So her fired Surgeon General Elders and then went on to shove a cigar into the vagina of a White House starlet... film at eleven.
First and foremost, you have to be comfortable with your own sexuality. You have to know that you can achieve an orgasm on your own without any drugs. Once you have mastered orgasm on your own, you can move on to mastering it with a partner(s) and with drugs.
Sex and spirituality
The only reason to use drugs is to achieve euphoria and the only reason to use drugs with sex is to achieve orgasm and to make those orgasms more and more intense. There are those who believe that at these intense levels of sexual orgasm, a new form of spiritual enlightenment is achieved. In this way sexuality can be fundamentally spiritual. People can come to use sex as a spiritual tool rather than it is used now to sell products, for power, or to tease... but not to please.
Our sexuality is usually conditioned by our culture. Our puritan culture conditions our sexuality to remain focused on our genitalia. Pornography is "hard core" because it is not sensual or erotic. Sex with drugs can improve on our erotica by turning our entire bodies into a sensual tuning fork, where we become as children are, as Freud said of them: "polymorphously perverse"... taking pleasure from every part of their/our bodies. Sex with the right kind of drugs can provide for this exquisite heightened sensuality. Sex with the right psychedelic drug, in the right setting and with the right set can be Christmas in Heaven!
Drugcraft in relation to sex with drugs would look toward orgasm as the light house—the safe harbor in the physiological sea of sex with drugs. How do you know you are taking too much or too soon? When it interferes with orgasm. Orgasmic pleasure and intensity can be your barometric gauge for dosing... for allowing that biological "switch" to occur. This sounds so beautifully simple... and it is accept for sex and drug guilt which prevents us from planning.
A plan without the guilt
So here is a sex with drugs plan without the guilt:
My drug of choice: one of the psychedelic amphetamines... Did someone say Ecstasy?
My set: At the end of a long period of sensuous foreplay I expect to have a fantastic orgasm where I die... go to heaven and am reborn.
My setting: I have a partner who has as her expectation that she also will have an absolutely fabulous orgasm. The time is totally free for this period—there are no other expectations to be met and the place is secure against all intrusions.
The drug-sex experience has been planned by the both of us to the extent that we are cautious about what we eat that day that might have a possible negative drug interaction later that night (i.e., MAO inhibitors). People who are taking psychiatric medication may have a problem achieving orgasm at all. People who are taking anti-depressants like PAXIL (SSRI's: selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors with a short half life) may never be able to orgasm while on these drugs. The physiological state into which we "load" our drug is like a biological setting. Our entire day should be planned with this in mind. For those people on psychiatrics, a drug holiday from medication might be just what the doctor ordered.
But from this point of view sex with drugs begins several hours before foreplay even starts. It begins with an acknowledgment of who we are: I am someone who wants to get "high". I am a human being who has the right to get "high" as long as I hurt no one else in the process. Furthermore, as long as I get "high" in a controlled way, I can use the benefits from that "high" to make the world a better place so that all of us can get "high" together.
Thanks to the drugs workshop