blog.bioethics.net

The Ultimate Sex Drug

Alta Charo turned us on to the best news ever in enhancement technology. The media will search high and low and find not a credible soul who will oppose it. It is the sex inhaler, the smell Pepe le Pew always thought that he emitted. It is the love drug. For real. New York Magazine's Julian Dibbell reports:

Now entering Phase 3 clinical trials: the first real, honest-to-God, horny-making, body-shaking, equal-opportunity aphrodisiac. Horn of rhinoceros. Penis of tiger. Root of sea holly. Husk of the emerald-green blister beetle known as the Spanish fly. So colorful and exotic is the list of substances that have been claimed to heighten sexual appetite that it’s hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment on first beholding the latest entry—a small white plastic nasal inhaler containing an odorless, colorless synthetic chemical called PT-141. Plain as it is, however, there is one thing that distinguishes PT-141 from the 4,000 years’ worth of recorded medicinal aphrodisiacs that precede it: It actually works.

And it’s coming to a medicine cabinet near you. The drug will soon enter Phase 3 clinical trials, the final round of testing before it goes to the Food and Drug Administration for review, and with the FDA’s approval it could reach the market in as soon as three years. The full range of possible risks and side effects has yet to be determined, but already this much is known: Putting that inhaler up your nose and popping off a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as few as fifteen minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel “genital warmth, tingling and throbbing,” not to mention “a strong desire to have sex.” Among men, who’ve been tested with the drug more extensively, the data set is, shall we say, richer... [details omitted, read them at the site if you must, I blushed]

The precise mechanisms by which PT-141 does its job remain unclear, but the rough idea is this: Where Viagra acts on the circulatory system, helping blood flow into the penis, PT-141 goes straight to the brain itself. And there it goes to work, switching on the same neural circuitry that lights up when a person actually, you know, wants to.

“It’s not merely allowing a sexual response to take place more easily,” explains Michael A. Perelman, co-director of the Human Sexuality Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a sexual-medicine adviser on the PT-141 trials. Though he cautions against jumping to conclusions, he’s hopeful that the drug represents a breakthrough. “It may be having an effect, literally, on how we think and feel.”

I see a lot of couples in my practice—lawyer couples, banker couples—who don’t know how to relax,” says Leonore Tiefer, a professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. “That’s fine—it’s a big asset to them in their corporate lifestyle, where they can work 80 hours a week—but then I have to shut off two BlackBerrys in my office in order to keep the noise down. They’re trained to multitask. Well, it doesn’t seem that that is really doable when it comes to sex. And they’re angry about that: It should be doable. And they need it to be doable because they only have five minutes.”

The five-minute meaningful sexual encounter: If ever there was a holy grail for the age of the tight-wired global economy—with its time-strapped labor force and its glut of bright, shiny distractions—that is it...

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.