"Just Slip This Into Her Drink..."

After a few thousand years of searching, and right in time to coincide with the sexual revolution, mankind has found new drugs that may lead to the first true aphrodisiacs. Newspapers heralded the initial discovery with their customary enthusiasm for sexual topics: "Chemical Aphrodisiac is Found"; "Scientists Stimulate Sexuality." Even the researcher who first broke the news at a medical symposium, Dr. William O'Malley, betrayed a measure of excitement: "We have seen 70-year-old men with a frequency of intercourse at least twice daily. This compares with intercourse five times a week by an average 20-year-old, newlywed male. In all of history, we have never known a true aphrodisiac, so this was quite a surprise. This is probably the first time in the history of man that we have seen alterations of the fundamental biochemistry in the brain that produced hypersexuality."

The news-making drug was a chemical compound called L-DOPA, whose aphrodisiac qualities seem now to have been overrated. But a closely related drug, PCPA, does appear to be a bona fide sexual stimulant. Not long after the L-DOPA announcement set off premature headlines, a research team at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, reported that PCPA produced a long-lasting sexual frenzy in rats, rabbits and cats and had induced at least one person--a woman undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer--to "start grabbing for everybody." Thus, some laboratory animals and one lusty lady may have earned themselves a place in medical history as pioneers in the age of the aphrodisiac--an elixir that could do for love what uranium did for war.

The search for a true aphrodisiac--a substance that either arouses sexual desire in another or enhances one's own sexual powers--is as old as recorded history and characterized by dedication, perseverance and ingenuity such as have been invested in few other human endeavors. It has encompassed practically every foodstuff, spice, beverage, narcotic and herb a person might dare put into his mouth or on his body, plus quite a number of other substances so exotic or noxious that one can only marvel at anyone's ability to stomach them. These include horses' placentae, the flesh of dead human beings, the sexual organs of various creatures and other equally unappetizing items. In short, the range of alleged aphrodisiacs seems to have been limited only by man's imagination.

Typically, a nostrum acquired an aphrodisiac reputation by way of legend, myth, ancient religious association, its physical resemblance to people or to genitals or simply through wishful thinking. The mandrake plant, for example, was long widely believed to be an aphrodisiac because it often grows to resemble a human figure. Similarly, a popular Roman aphrodisiac, satyrion, comes from a plant whose root consists of two tubers that bear a striking resemblance to testicles. The sexy reputation of the oyster is said to derive from the fact that on the half shell, it looks--to some--like a woman's shaved genitals.

For obvious reasons, aphrodisiac qualities have also been attributed to the sexual organs of various animals. In 17th Century France, eating a ram's testes was thought to increase sexual desire. In Algeria and Morocco, that power was conferred on the testes of the lion. In Italy, the esteemed chef Cartolomeo Scappi was known for his lamb's-testes recipes. Elsewhere, the organs of donkeys and roosters enjoyed great popularity.

Quite a number of spices, particularly members of the pepper family, came to be regarded as aphrodisiacs because they can irritate the urogenital tract, causing a tingling sensation. The drug yohimbine, extracted from the bark of the yohimbé tree, similarly irritates the urinary tract and has long been used as a sex stimulant by the native tribes of West Africa and South America. Taking an even more direct approach, laggard lovers in ancient Greece applied powerful skin irritants, such as mustard and Spanish fly, directly to their genitals in order to stimulate an erection. They usually got their erections, but whether they got their jollies is another question; nor does history record the reactions of wives and girlfriends who were treated to peppered penises.

Belief in aphrodisiacs, however, is by no means restricted to the ancients. Today, powdered rhinoceros horn and reindeer antler are world-wide sellers. The demand is so great, in fact, that a single, large rhinoceros horn brings a hunter over $1000 on today's market. Reindeer antlers go for a dollar a pound, while a single Korean ginseng root, the latest Hollywood rage, can command as much as $1000. The root, which various people describe as resembling either a human figure or a penis, is used in brewing an acrid tea or as a powder in capsules, and is thought to restore or enhance virility.

Shops from New York's Greenwich Village to the New Orleans French Quarter, in the lotusland of Southern California and the boondocks of the Deep South in are doing a booming business today in aphrodisiac herbs, potions, oils, creams and other preparations based variously on ancient Oriental, European or even American Indian formulas. In Europe, in addition to herbs and oils for anointing one's body, a love seeker might try a cup of vervain, a drink prepared from mistletoe berries; elecampane, a flower-seed preparation; or tanto krin, a Russian concoction made from powdered antlers and an alcoholic brine. In West Germany, a chain of department stores devoted exclusively to erotica does a $6,000,000-a-year business peddling some 1500 items promising to stimulate, prolong or otherwise improve sex.

If none of these products possesses genuine aphrodisiac qualities, at least they are generally harmless. And the so-called aphrodisiac foods and diets that frequently appear in books and magazines are usually more healthful than a hamburger with French fries; but that's about all one could say for them.

On the other hand, almost any of the so-called aphrodisiacs can produce the desired effect--if the user believes it will work. In such cases, all the individual really needs is the placebo effect of nibbling on some bad-tasting root or herb, plus a little positive thinking. Faith not only moves mountains; it can also raise a stalwart erection. "It's a state of mind, not body," says Aaron Morris, proprietor of Kiehl's Pharmacy in New York's East Village. Kiehl's peddles such enticing items as Compelling Oil, Indian Love Powder, Cleopatra Oil and Hi John the Conqueror Root; but Morris makes no special claims for these products. "When people have that kind of feeling," he says, "it doesn't matter what they take. It could be aspirin."

Occasionally, however, a not-so-harmless preparation becomes available. One doctor recounted the case of a young business executive who was given some "supersex" vitamin pills by a colleague, with the promise that they would give him extraordinary sexual vigor. Not long after, he traveled to another city to conduct a round of conferences with various clients. Arriving early one evening, he took one of the pills and went out on the town. Before too long, he happily encountered a young lady, who, after a few drinks, invited him to her apartment. To his chagrin, he was totally unable to perform. The next morning, the day of the planned conferences, he awoke to find that he could not speak. A second side effect of the supersex drug was to paralyze the larynx for 24 hours.

Far more tragic is the toll of deaths from the best-known and most dangerous of supposed aphrodisiacs, Spanish fly. As far back as 18th Century France, it was ties at which the food was treated with this substance; and historians have uncovered numerous instances of fatal and near-fatal poisonings. On the morning after one such party, attended by some 20 persons, the entire dinner ensemble was found dead. More recently, a London clerk was convicted of murder when, after failing to seduce his girlfriend by conventional methods, he mixed up a batch of Spanish fly--laced chocolate bonbons. As chance would have it, she was faithfully sticking to a diet and gave the chocolates to a friend, who ate them and died.

The active ingredient in Spanish fly is a poison called cantharidin. It is extracted from the dried remains of an insect commonly called the blister beetle, which defends itself by secreting a substance that burns or blisters the skin of anyone who picks it up. Taken internally, cantharidin causes irritation of the kidneys and urinary tract, burning in the throat, abdominal pain, vomiting, shock and sometimes death. In tiny enough amounts, the irritation of the urinary tract may be perceived as a tingling in the sexual organs; but as little as one grain can be fatal to human beings.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of man's compulsive and sometimes hazardous search for an aphrodisiac is why human beings should want one at all. According to most doctors and anthropologists, man is already the sexiest creature on earth, thanks to a powerful libido--or sex drive--that really needs no enhancement. "The human animal is capable of screwing 365 days a year," says one doctor bluntly. "As far as I know, he is the only member of the animal kingdom that can do that." In fact, the doctors say, the average human being with a completely unfettered libido would probably never get the chores done. But many people are so hung up with sexual anxiety, guilt and inhibitions acquired from social and religious training that it's a wonder they are able to make love at all. And, of course, many of them don't, from either dumb choice or inability--or both.

The power of the libido helps explain the widely held current belief that such drugs as marijuana, hashish and the opiates have aphrodisiac qualities. Simply because they depress the central nervous system and relax inhibitions, these drugs sometimes do produce aphrodisiaclike effects. Marijuana, for instance, may distort one's sense of time and affect the sense of touch in ways that for some people increase the pleasure of copulation and climax. But none of these drugs is a true aphrodisiac in the sense that it arouses sexual desire.

There is evidence, in fact, that in many people, marijuana reduces the sex satisfy it. Unlike the randy, wide-eyed, energetic drunk, the pothead may be content to contemplate the pleasures of sex without actually getting any. In addition, marijuana and some of the stronger drugs can create obstacles to sex that more than compensate for the relaxing of inhibitions. The majority, for example, are mildly anesthetizing to the genitalia, and some produce a degree of nausea. In slightly stronger doses, they tend to put people to sleep or to so depress the central nervous system that the sexual apparatus is impaired. Habitual heroin users, for example, are rarely able to perform the sex act.

One doctor, who was seeking something to help his nonorgasmic patients, came across a narcotic-containing beverage from Morocco that was alleged to be an aphrodisiac. It consisted of an absinthelike liqueur, a little tincture of opium to relax inhibitions and a trace quantity of Spanish fly intended to produce a slight tingling in the urogenital tract. Determined to test it, the doctor took the liqueur home and his wife proceeded to prepare a romantic candlelight dinner. Following dinner, he poured two ponies of the drink and, after clinking glasses, they drank them down. The next morning, the good doctor and his wife awoke--still at their dining-room table. The potion had put them both directly to sleep.

The hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD, have also been cited as aphrodisiacs. According to the drug's advocates, LSD qualifies as an aphrodisiac not because of any power to arouse sexual desire but because of its ability to open new dimensions of sensation and the new insights it affords into the sexual experience. Indeed, a person on an LSD trip may well imagine any number of pleasant variations and permutations on the sex experience. But there is always the risk of a bad trip with equally unpleasant results. It has even been claimed that a person on LSD doesn't really need a partner to have a sexual experience; he can just imagine everything. And in one case, reported in these pages some years ago, a man who had taken LSD was unable to obtain an erection, despite the vigorous assistance of his partner. But then, he said, he was overcome with an awareness that "My entire body was one great erect penis and the world was my vagina...." Whether inducing such quasi-sexual experiences qualifies LSD as an aphrodisiac is largely a question of semantics. Like marijuana and the narcotics, LSD doesn't arouse sexual desires that aren't already present.

Researchers say that the development of a true aphrodisiac will come only with the discovery of something that acts specifically on the brain's sex center. They know, for example, that the sex experience is essentially psychological and that no drug acting solely on the central nervous system or on the sex organs will create a desire for sex. In women, direct physical stimulation of the clitoris won't produce even hard breathing, let alone a climax, unless the woman wants it to--or is willing to let it. In men, there is a low-level reflex action by which penis stimulation can bring about an erection and ejaculation, but it produces little or no sexual pleasure unless the man is mentally aroused.

In the same way, drugs that act on the over-all brain are unsuccessful because, if they stimulate a person mentally, they also tend to stimulate anxieties and inhibitions; and if they are depressive, they depress both. In the case of the narcotics, which are mostly depressants, the drugs depress not only the brain but also the sexual apparatus, the sensory nerves and a number of body processes that, when disrupted, often produce nausea, discomfort and sleepiness.

It was in this context that researchers discovered the apparent aphrodisiac effects of L-DOPA and PCPA. Unlike all the previous so-called aphrodisiacs, these two drugs did work specifically on certain well-defined brain centers. They were being tested in the treatment of Parkinson's disease, a progressive degenerative disease that annually strikes some 500,000 Americans, generally between the ages of 50 and 70. It is characterized by trembling hands, shuffling gait, drooling, speech impairment and an immobile, expressionless face, and it causes eventual invalidism and death. About ten years ago, a Viennese scientist observed that patients who had died of Parkinsonism had abnormally low levels of a vital brain chemical, dopamine, in certain parts of the brain that normally are rich in the substance. Suspecting that this deficiency might cause the Parkinson symptoms, he treated a number of patients with the chemical. His experiments were unsuccessful; dopamine, it was discovered later, cannot cross a natural body defense called "the blood-brain barrier" between the brain and the rest of the body.

Several years later, another scientist discovered that though dopamine couldn't cross the barrier, its immediate chemical precursor, levo-3, 4-dihydroxy-phenylalanine--or L-DOPA--could get into the brain from the blood stream. There, a naturally occurring enzyme converted the L-DOPA into dopamine. This discovery led to a five-year test program involving 601 patients in 22 hospitals across the country. The results of the program, announced at a Georgetown University symposium last fall, showed that more than 60 percent of those treated experienced some improvement in their condition, including about five percent who had a complete reversal of symptoms. What attracted the most publicity, however, was a minuscule two percent who also experienced the apparent aphrodisiac side effect described by Dr. O'Malley.

This is not necessarily a true aphrodisiac effect, explains Dr. Morris Belkin of the National Institutes of Health. "If you had been lying on your back and thinking about having a woman for the past ten years, but couldn't because of your disease," he said, "once you were relieved of your symptoms, you might become sexually active, too." Doctors still don't understand exactly how L-DOPA works, he went on, or why dopamine deficiency causes Parkinson symptoms. Nor can they explain the apparent aphrodisiac side effect. Moreover, he concludes, the tiny percentage of patients exhibiting any increased sexuality--and the problem of such side effects as nausea and emotional disturbances--doesn't warrant much optimism about the drug's potential as an aphrodisiac. Its use in the treatment of Parkinsonism is much more promising.

But the second drug, parachloro-phenylalanine, or PCPA, does show promise as an aphrodisiac, according to Dr. Gian L. Gessa, a member of the four-man research team at the National Heart Institute that discovered it. "We are optimistic," Dr. Gessa says, "that our work may lead to the development of a true aphrodisiac." While L-DOPA remains something of a mystery, scientists think they understand how PCPA works. Most of the brain centers, Dr. Gessa explains, contain two opposing pathways, or "circuits": one that stimulates and one that inhibits. By pulling against each other, they remain in balance. Each of these circuits depends on a specific chemical substance, called a neurotransmitter, that facilitates the transmission of nerve impulses from one nerve cell to the next.

In the so-called limbic system, a small region of the brain believed to control both sex drive and sleep, the neurotransmitter for the stimulatory circuit is called norepinephrine; its inhibitory counterpart is called serotonin. In layman's terms, says Dr. Gessa, "Serotonin says 'no' to sex and 'yes' to sleep, while norepinephrine says just the opposite." As an added precaution against the system's getting out of balance, he goes on, the body provides a third substance, called monoamine oxidase, or MAO, which acts as a kind of policeman, destroying any excess of either neurotransmitter that might accumulate. PCPA alone, he says, has a slight aphrodisiac effect, because it depresses the level of serotonin in the limbic center, thus allowing the sex-stimulating norepinephrine to become dominant. But the MAO, exercising its police function, tries to counteract this imbalance by destroying the excess norepinephrine. This led scientists to add a second drug to the treatment, pargyline, which blocks the MAO from doing its work. The end result is that the inhibitory serotonin is depressed by the PCPA while the stimulatory norepinephrine accumulates and increasingly intensifies the sex drive.

In the laboratory, the research team first administered the drugs to 80 male rats. "The sexual excitation lasted for several hours and usually reached a climax with all the animals in one cage attempting to mount each other at the same time," the team reported. When the drugs were given to rabbits, the effects were even more pronounced and long-lasting. Does this mean that man's long quest for a magical love potion has finally ended? Not quite, says Dr. Gessa. Research work has only begun and the drugs have not yet been fully tested on human beings. It would be foolhardy to assume that the brains of rats and humans are identical or that the drugs would have identical effects on both. Secondly, the drugs could have unsuspected psychic and physical side effects that would preclude their use. Finally, even if the drugs prove safe and effective on human beings, they would not satisfy the traditional love-potion requirement of rapid action. It takes at least four days of steady administration before the drugs have an effect, Dr. Gessa says, and then it takes another several days without sleep before they wear off. In short, PCPA is not a feasible drug with which to ply one's inhibited girlfriend. But as a medical tool for doctors treating impotence and frigidity, the drugs do show great promise. Doctors could administer them over a period of four days, send patients home for a wild weekend and then, after the desired result has been achieved, inject them with a chemical precursor of serotonin that would enable them to get some much-needed sleep.

Doctors would welcome the perfection of such a treatment, according to Dr. Richard H. Edenbaum, a prominent internist in the posh Chevy Chase suburb of Washington, not far from the National Institutes of Health, where the research is taking place. "I hope this research can prove fruitful," he says, "because it will give us a valuable medicament for a very serious medical problem. Three out of ten patients in my practice come in with complaints of frigidity or impotence in one or both of the partners. And this has led to divorce and (concluded on page 176)slip this into her drink...(continued from page 86) separation and a lot of unhappiness. If this could be solved, then most of the problems between husband and wife that psychiatrists see could be solved in bed. One of the best tools we have had in breaking down the barriers between marriage partners is, when an argument occurs, for the wife to take off her clothes immediately. My experience has been that this ends most arguments successfully."

Thus, while PCPA may someday help doctors cure marital sex problems, it holds little promise for the unmarried lover seeking a handy chemical to assist him in his or her wooing. There is, however, one substance that can offer substantial aid and, in fact, has been used for centuries for precisely this purpose. Ethyl alcohol--booze--when used in moderation, lowers sexual inhibitions. Since it is quantitatively much less powerful than even the mild narcotics, it can be used effectively in lowering defenses without clobbering the central nervous system. Used in excess, of course, it has just the opposite effect. In fact, in their new book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, the St. Louis sex researchers Masters and Johnson cite immoderate use of alcohol--getting zonked--as one of the major causes of impotence in the United States. As in other drugs, dosage is critical and the effects, of course, vary from individual to individual.

"The best aphrodisiac," says one doctor, "and all that is really needed, is a normal healthy couple with a normal physical attraction for each other, pleasant surroundings and perhaps a martini or so to relax them. Ogden Nash boiled it down to the essentials when he wrote his classic line 'Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.' "