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They call it `Sextasy': Young men turn to Viagra to keep the party
going
By Thea Singer
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Viagra's not just your father's little blue pill anymore.
What Playboy king Hugh Hefner called ``the best legal recreational drug'' in 1998 is being used today by scores of young Boston-area partygoers as an antidote to the wilting effects of alcohol and club drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine.
``A result of ecstasy is kids feel sexy but they can't have an erection,''
said Chris Haynes, 32, who gets the skinny on nightlife trends through
his job as a Boston publicist. ``So they take a Viagra
and call it `Sextasy.' ''
In the past two years, Kevin Kapila, mental-health medical director at Boston's Fenway Community Health, has become all too familiar with the use of Viagra among young gay men to counteract the effects of methamphetamine use.
``The rise in crystal use is huge in the gay community here,'' said Kapila. ``It's used in sex parties and sex clubs, and dance clubs, too.''
Indeed, a recent study by Express Scripts research director Tom Delate found that use of Pfizer's Viagra by men ages 18 to 45 grew by 312 percent between 1998 and 2002. About 5 percent of the patient data surveyed came from Massachusetts Blue Cross/Blue Shield alone.
The revelers themselves wax rhapsodic about the drug's expansive effects
- though some add that newcomers to the class, such as Eli Lilly's
Cialis, pack a perkier punch.
``Cialis lasts for 36 hours,'' said a man in his 30s who's taken Viagra or its competitors six times in the past year. But that has a downside. ``You can't go to a gym,'' he said. ``If you ride a bike, you can forget about it.''
The man, who asked that his name not be used, popped the pills when
he knew he'd be partying with two to four women at once. Intercourse
is possible ``with three women
in a row easily,'' he said, ``like I was 15 again.''
Men straight and gay alike generally get their recreational supplies over the Internet, from friends with prescriptions or dealers, and even from Dad's medicine cabinet.
The stuff doesn't come cheap: Each pill retails for $10. But because 100-milligram pills cost the same as 50s, purchasing the higher dose and cracking it in two is the popular way to go.
Medical experts, however, sound a cautionary note - and not just because the drugs can have dangerous or even lethal reactions with other chemicals, such as nitrates. While doctors have become more comfortable prescribing the pills for performance anxiety to those well under Viagra pitchman Bob Dole's advanced age, they're worried that young men will see them as a panacea.
``My main concern has been among men 18 to 25 who may have no difficulties with erections and sexuality, but who have the impression that if they're pharmacologically enhanced they're going to be more adequate in relationships, a better lover, more appealing,'' said Abraham Morgentaler, a Harvard Medical School urology professor and author of ``The Viagra Myth'' (Jossey-Bass, 2003), whose own patients have told him about parties among 20-somethings that feature ``bowls of Viagra.'' ``They lose an opportunity to be accepted and loved for who they are.''
source :-http://theedge.bostonherald.com | 
