The Molecule of More

DRUGS

to confession on a regular basis, and received emotional support that helped

him cut back his viewing habits. But when his work assigned him to an

overseas branch, everything fell apart. Unable to speak the local language,

he became socially isolated, and his compulsion flared up worse than ever.

He said, “What makes this so hard is the inner struggle, the conflict within.

It’s a war against yourself.” Feeling completely out of control, he no longer

believed it was a strictly moral failing. “I need to fight this on a chemical

level because at some point I want to get married.”

Thanks to the internet, sexually graphic material is more easily available
than ever before. Some people maintain that it is possible to become
addicted to pornography, even for otherwise healthy people taking no
medication at all. In 2015 the Daily Mail claimed that as many as one
in  twenty-five young adults in  the  United Kingdom were believed to  be 
sex addicts.
A reporter from the newspaper spoke to researchers at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge who described experiments in which they had
placed young men in brain scanners, and then piped in pornographic
videos for them to watch. As expected, their dopamine circuits lit up.
The circuits went back to normal when ordinary videos were displayed.
The scientists put other volunteers in front of a computer, and
found that of all the content on the internet, pictures of undressed
women were most likely to make young men click compulsively. They
also discovered that showing people “highly arousing sexual pictures”
was distracting when they were trying to pay attention to something
else. (Amateur scientists can try this experiment at home.) At the end of
the study they concluded that compulsive sexual behavior was fueled by
easy access to sexual images on the internet.

THE POWER OF EASY ACCESS

When it comes to addiction, easy access matters. More people get
addicted to cigarettes and alcohol than to heroin, even though heroin
hits the brain in a way that is more likely to trigger addiction. Cigarettes