The Importance of Understanding Addiction

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Between 10 and 15% of the population have addiction problems. This means that each GP with an average list of 2,300 patients will have something in the order of 300 addicts to look after. An average GP would see four new cancers a year. We'll see one case of Crohn's disease every six years. But we'll have 300 addicts. So there's something very strange in medical education, which is where I put the blame. If the experience of today's medical students was any different from mine, I had not one single lesson in six years on addiction. And incidentally, as a GP, I hadnot one less non-counseling either.

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn allows the timid to indulge fantasies they’d never live out in real life and the adventurous to experiment with new forms of pleasure. Now that it has stepped down from the top shelf and waltzed across the internet we can all enjoy it. All we need to do is stop pretending it’s something dirty and come straight out and salute it. Or maybe not. Porn after all is selling a lie: that women are always eager to engage in extreme practices, that bodies are always tanned and buffed, orgasms explosive. Isn’t this a recipe for frustration and disappointment? And to attract the restless voyeur, porn is always having to up the ante – cyber-sex is getting ever more degrading and extreme. Men are finding it harder to be satisfied with their real world partners, women are feeling inadequate and pressured to live up to the cyber-competition – this is the reality of pornland. So which is it – the great liberator of the libido or a blight on...

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