Sex is best when you know what's happening

Is sex better on drugs? Timothy Leary certainly thought so. He wrote that sex on LSD felt as if every cell in your body was making love to every cell in your partners – a description that made my virginal, innocent teenage self long to give it a go.

The night I lost my virginity was pretty intense. You see this was also the first time I tried LSD or any drugs at all. Whenever I tell people this, they are a bit shocked. For the most part they presume that my good friend and part-time boyfriend, Marek, gave me drugs to get me out of my head and out of my underwear. But this was not really the case.
Well, I imagine he may have been thinking along those lines – he was a horny young man after all – but it was my idea. Our relationship had been getting steadily more sexual for weeks, but I had been holding out for a variety of reasons – fear of pain; fear of doing it ‘wrong’; and the residual Catholic guilt of convent girls. Constant vigilance and bad behaviour are needed to stamp it out and I, not being fond of pansy-arsed half measures, decided to go for broke in one evening.
It wasn’t an experience I’d recommend. I lay the blame solely on Mr Leary – and the fact that what is sold as LSD these days bears little resemblance to whatever John and Yoko must have been taking when they decided to have a bed-in. Firstly I got the giggles. Secondly I was distracted. We were listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and every note seemed so perfect it keep drawing me away from the slightly more urgent matter of the naked man before me.
I think that Pink Floyd may have been distracting simply because I couldn’t look at Marek’s penis. I’d had numerous encounters – although none quite so intimate – with it before and it had seemed a rather decent and attractive member of the species. But in a fit of shopping indecision I had grabbed a box of coloured condoms at the all-night store. A massive manhood sheathed in red latex coming at me while I was experiencing my first hallucinations was frankly terrifying! As a drug of seduction, acid is not the best choice.
All the scaremongering about drugs, and let’s face it, for some illegal substances that’s certainly justifiable, ignores one important fact – people take drugs for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are sexual.
I don’t want to be coy here and use the politician’s favourite “I didn’t inhale” style of bullshit. I’ve tried drugs and was indeed curious to see if they had any effect on my sex life. On the other hand, I don’t want to give offer any kind of tacit approval to people taking whatever chemicals are available to purchase. So a word of warning first – while most people I know who have, or still do, take recreational drugs now and again are fine upstanding citizens who work and pay their taxes, I’ve lost more than a handful of friends through drug use.
A few became addicts and I have no idea where they are now. In one especially sad case, a girl I knew ended up as a crack whore, literally. The last time I saw her, her boyfriend was pimping her out to feed their mutual habit. I have had four different friends end up in psychiatric hospitals after bad acid trips – one of whom has been in and out of hospital for the last ten years. None of them seemed in any way mentally unstable previously. LSD can, I believe, cause toxic psychosis, a disorder similar to schizophrenia. Another, an ex-boyfriend who I love dearly, has just about fried his brains using meth.
If the statistics are to be believed, many of you have tried various types of illegal thrills, so I decided to ask around, to find out what other people thought about sex and drugs as a combination. The thing that surprised me was that although a lot of the girls enjoyed sex on pills a great number of guys felt this was a no-no.
When E first hit the club scene it was regarded as a “love drug” causing otherwise uptight folk to snog, shag or just get all touchy feely with strangers. That’s the active ingredient, MDMA, which causes users to feel euphoria, empathy, love, happiness – in other words to feel ecstatic – doing its job.
Trouble is that illegal substances have no quality control and according to EcstasyData.org around 34% of the pills sold as ecstasy last year contained no MDMA at all. In fact, pills are generally so adulterated in Ireland and the UK, that these days most users generally expect more of a speed-like rush than an MDMA loved-up buzz.
Gareth reckoned that pills lowered his libido and Jim said that he had difficulty maintaining an erection. Chris decided he preferred to cuddle, complaining that while pills made him “super-horny” he generally didn’t have the energy by the time he got home. An ex of mine who had gone from taking E a few times a month to having between five or eight every time he went out (plus drinking) became completely useless as a lover. When he wasn’t too wired and chewing his mouth to pieces, he was happy to spend hours playing with me, but when he took excessive amounts he couldn’t stay hard long enough to actually shag me. Which didn’t suit me at all!
No one was more of a mine of information than Andy, who it has to be admitted hoovered up drugs in vast quantities until a bad experience made him re-evaluate his lifestyle. He’d tried just about everything except crack and heroin. He told me that he’d had some of the best sexual experiences of his life on pills; coke, unless taken in smallish amounts, made his heart race, making sex slightly scary; meth made him very horny and shrooms made him far too relaxed for anything more taxing than spooning.
Almost everyone I asked agreed that sex while stoned was a good thing – as long as you weren’t too stoned. Triona however found that while grass was fine, smoking hash made it difficult for her to lubricate. I’d noticed that too – and it’s one of the main reasons I don’t smoke it.
I’d been quite fond of the Swazi Gold my housemate used to grow in our backyard when I lived in South Africa, but had stopped smoking soon after I got to Ireland. I was spoiled, I suppose. The quality of the grass generally available wasn’t – or isn’t – worth the trouble of procuring (and with reports of miniature glass particles used to bulk it up, I’m glad I stopped bothering). Mostly all I could find was hash and this had no discernible effect other than to give me a dry mouth and make store-bought lube a necessity. Not sexy at all.
Taking drugs involves risk – and personally I believe it should be up to individuals to make that choice, not the State. That said, certain drugs including E can lower the efficacy of birth control pills and all of them – to one degree or another – lower your ability to make smart choices.
These days, except for a tendency to drink too much when I’m feeling shy, I live a remarkably straight life. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by giving you some clichéd line that love is the best high of all (although it’s certainly pretty good) but through trial and error I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy sex best when I’m well aware of what’s happening.
But I will say this – whatever you do, know the risks, be careful, and always, always, carry a condom.