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A Neuroendocrine Perspective of Sex and Drugs

  • Chapter
Neurobiology of Opioids

Abstract

The last 20 years have witnessed an alarming increase in the use of addictive drugs (including opiates), coincident with a more liberal view on sexuality. These contemporaneous events inevitably led to the popular association between drugs and sex which may well have contributed to the desire of many young people to “experience drugs”. On the other hand, the attack on drug-taking by some sectors of society was probably only using this accidental timing of events to show a disdain for the “new sexuality”. One wonders if the present “drug problem” would have been averted more effectively had it been appreciated that the body itself makes and uses opiate-like substances (endogenous opioid peptides, EOP) and perhaps opiates also, and that these substances, by and large, suppress many reproductive processes, of which sex is but one. Indeed, this chapter could well be retitled: “Opioidergic inhibition of reproductive functions”.

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Authors
  1. O. F. X. Almeida
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  2. D. G. Pfeiffer
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroendocrinology, Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Kraepelinstraße 2, D-8000, München 40, Germany

    Osborne F. X. Almeida

  2. Department of Neuropharmacology, Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, D-8033, Martinsried, Germany

    Toni S. Shippenberg

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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Almeida, O.F.X., Pfeiffer, D.G. (1991). A Neuroendocrine Perspective of Sex and Drugs. In: Almeida, O.F.X., Shippenberg, T.S. (eds) Neurobiology of Opioids. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46660-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46660-1_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-46662-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-46660-1

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