LETTER: Pornography not a drug

To the editor:

“Fight the new drug” supporters have recently been using this paper as a platform to claim that pornography acts as a drug that causes euphoria and rampant addiction. I have a few questions for these people:
   
Question 1, why don’t people at art museums foam at the mouth and collapse into an epileptic episode of euphoria when they see works of art like David or Vitruvian Man? Because that’s what most people would do if you injected them with heroin or meth.
   
Question 2, how do nudists survive what is clearly an overdose? They like to spend copious amounts of time in the vicinity of their naked friends and they usually don’t even get sexually aroused. In fact, it’s actually against naturist social norms for someone to flaunt any sexual arousal (whether moisture or stiffness) they may have. On the occasion someone does get sexually aroused, they simply cover themselves with a towel until the arousal dissipates. However, if you constantly injected someone with heroin or meth for the amount of time some people stay in nudist colonies, they would die. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone overdosing on pornography. Ever.
   
It would be really disappointing if the answer to both these questions was “because pornography is not actually a drug” because that would mean that our friends over at Fight the New Drug are manipulating and cherry-picking real scientific data to fulfill an agenda much in the same way young earth creationists have repeatedly been rebuked for.  

Ben Maxfield