The Wellcome-funded Pharmacosexuality project looks at the relationship between the pharmaceuticalisation of sexuality, health promotion, and recreational drug use in sexual contexts.

In the Pharmacosexuality project, the investigators are particularly interested in how this relationship might change current paradigms of sexual health, as well as the ways in which this relationship has shifted across time.

The project uses archival and empirical research to develop a socially, historically and culturally informed approach to drugs and sex, which we have termed ‘pharmacosexuality’.

The project intervenes in debates about sex and drugs at a particularly significant moment. The use of illicit drugs in sexual contexts and its implications for public health is receiving closer attention than ever before. Current research remains focused on men who have sex with men involved in ‘chemsex’, viewed predominantly in terms of risk and harm reduction. But the pleasurable and experimental dimensions of drug use in sexual contexts, how it may shape ‘pharmacosexual’ identities, and its relationship with pharmaceutical interventions for sex, remains under-researched.

There is also a need to situate chemsex, as well as attempts to define and regulate it, within a broader historical frame: from the adventures of nineteenth-century poets and decadents with hashish and opium, to the acid-dropping experiments of psychosexual therapists and sexual revolutionaries in the 1950s and 1960s, to the public information campaigns of the AIDS crisis, sex and drugs have consistently been drawn together in profound but ever-mutating ways.

More information about the project is available here.