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I wasn’t snooping. I’ve read all the advice books and know that children need their privacy. But Tommy had been using the car the night before, and my keys were nowhere to be found, so I looked in his room.
Unlike the stereotypical teenage boy, Tommy keeps his room fairly neat. Oh, the bed was unmade, but there wasn’t any dirty laundry on the floor or used dishes on the desk. A quick glance showed that the keys weren’t on his bedside table or the dresser.
I started looking in drawers. Perhaps he had put them away without thinking. The top dresser drawer held nothing but socks, and the desk drawer had been missing ever since my husband bought the thing for his first apartment. That left the bedside table.
The bedside table drawer held a stack of magazines (two copies of Rolling Stone covering up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and a Penthouse; maybe I was snooping just a little), the microphone from an old cassette recorder, a box of colored pencils, some pennies, and a matchbox. Inside the matchbox were nine little green triangular pills. I knew exactly what they were, too. Efracol. The seduction pill.
After all, I’d invented it.
*****
The name “Efracol” wasn’t my doing. Some marketing person at Wellaxo came up with that, presumably by pulling Scrabble tiles out of a hat. Its full name is Dibutyl Catecholandrogen, and it first came to my attention during my postdoctoral research at Duke.
My thesis project back at Penn had been on neurohormones -- a class of messenger molecules which could function both as neurotransmitters and as hormones. I had hoped that the study of neurohormones might clarify the ancient mind/body problem. I’m firmly a materialist, by the way. I believe that all questions of consciousness and thought can be ultimately answered by the study of the brain.
When I got my degree in 1997, I started looking around for a post-doc position. Morris Fischbein at Duke invited me to join his lab. Morris was a great guy. Most tenured researchers like him treat their grad students and post-docs as so much unpaid labor, to be rewarded with co-author status on a paper along with the other twenty members of the team. Not Morris. He did his own work -- wonderful, groundbreaking work on the formation of synaptic pathways -- and let the others in his lab do what they wanted.
He was also a fountain of ideas. He once showed me his notebook, an old black grade-school composition book with pages and pages of topics to explore. “I’m not generous,” he said. “I’m lazy. I’ll never live long enough to do all these experiments. By giving the ideas away, I can find out what I want to know without doing any of the work.”
One of the ideas jotted down in his neat print was “EMOTIONS -- how does a mental state have a physiological effect? Neurohormones?”
I took that one and ran with it.
Because I would be working on animals, I had to pick fairly basic emotions to study. Shame, loyalty, or jealousy would be too complicated. How do you make a rat jealous? So I stuck to the basics -- things like fear, anger, or arousal.
In the end paperwork determined what emotion I studied. Any work with live animals requires a stack of forms a yard high from the Animal Care people. To make my rats frightened or angry would have needed another three-foot stack. But since rats have sex all the time, I didn’t need to fill out any forms beyond the initial load in order to study their mating behavior. So I decided to look for the biochemical basis of arousal.
Years later, Morris told me, “I remember thinking that your project was the kind of thing only a woman would do. Male scientists would be too embarrassed to admit they were studying what makes a rat horny.”
If you want the whole story, you can read my Scientific American article in the November 2002 issue. Suffice it to say that after three years of work and fifty or sixty dead rats, I had a molecule. Dibutyl Catecholandrogen, or DBCA for short. I could inject a female rat with DBCA and within fifteen minutes she would begin exhibiting all the signs of readiness to mate -- ear twitching, lordosis, lubrication. It didn’t matter if the nearest male rat was two floors up and on the other side of a concrete wall. Even spayed rats with no uterus or ovaries would respond.
I published my results in the Spring 2001 issue of Biochemistry. A week after it appeared I got a phone call.
“Dr. Pickens? My name is Dave Zhao. I’m a researcher up at Wellaxo.”
The name was vaguely familiar. The world of science is still a small town. “You did a paper on autocoids at the Gordon Conference.”
“That’s right. I saw your Biochemistry piece about catecholandrogens. Really neat stuff. Anyway, I’m part of a team working on treatments for sexual dysfunctions. Your work sounds like a real breakthrough. Would you be interested in helping us out?”
Researchers in academia always drool over the resources and money available in industry. I tried to sound calm and professional. “I’d be very interested.”
So for the next six months I split my time between Duke and Wellaxo, and didn’t get nearly enough sleep. Tommy was in second grade at Durham Academy, and Jonathan was trying to earn enough as a reporter for the News & Observer to pay the school’s tuition, with a little left over for food and the mortgage. My stipend as an outside consultant with Dave’s team was a big help.
My real contributions came at the beginning of the project. I showed Dave and his group how to extract DBCA, and helped come up with a way to synthesize it. I had been concerned with how it worked rather than the structure of the molecule, but the Wellaxo people needed to know how to build DBCA from scratch. My consulting contract ran out in August of 2001, and after that I mostly stayed in touch by email. I was looking for a tenure-track job, I was pregnant with Natasha, and the lab had been invaded by MDs preparing the human trials, so there really wasn’t anything for me to do anyway.
The first human trials were done in the spring of 2002. Dave was kind enough to call me up with the results. “It was amazing, Claudia. We had fifty people in all. Twenty women with sexual dysfunctions, twenty healthy women students from NC State, and ten male volunteers. Half of each set got DBCA.”
“How often?”
“Weekly doses over ten weeks. And the results were really something! The dysfunctionals went from an average of one sexual partnering every month to once a week. But the healthy subjects all went way up. The weekly average beforehand was one point two. Are you sitting down?”
“Yes, why?”
“The average with DCBA was five point seven partnerings a week for the healthy women.”
It took a second for me to process that. “Five point seven? I don’t believe it. What kind of dosage were you using?”
“Five micrograms. About two point five parts per billion blood concentration.”
The same as in my rats. “My God, Dave. Those women would have to be having sex every night to get averages like that.”
“One subject reported an average of eight point nine per week on DBCA.” There was a note of glee in his voice.
“Jesus. What about the men?”
“They went from an average of one point four to an average of one point eight. And get this -- the men in the control group increased by almost the same amount, to one point seven. I’m thinking placebo effect.”
“Probably. Did the tablets work out, or did you have to inject them?”
“Oh, the tablets worked great. Very fast absorption -- you could almost see it taking effect, especially with the healthy volunteers. Down the hatch, and boom! Ten horny women.”
“It worked that way with the rats, but I thought humans might be a little more restrained. Maybe you should cut the dose for the next round.”
“Oh yes. We’re making up a batch of two mike tablets, and I’m going to put out a general call for volunteers. We’ll run a six-month test, and then the Marketing people want to start clinical trials.”
“Clinical trials already? Dave, maybe we should go a bit more slowly with this.”
“Are you kidding? Claudia, think of all those aging Boomer women hitting menopause. This could be really big. The Legal people have filed already with the FDA for approval to start. Oh, and Marketing came up with a new name: Efracol.”
“Efracol? That’s a dumb name. What’s the matter with DBCA?”
“Can’t trademark it. Besides, you should hear what the techs call it. TFD.”
“TFD?”
“The Fuck Drug.”
*****
I was waiting for Tommy when he got home (I never did find the car keys, so I wound up calling a cab). He stowed his bike in the garage and came in through the laundry room to the kitchen, where I was sitting.
“Tommy, come here.”
He must have caught the note of anger in my voice, because he dropped obediently into the chair opposite mine at the breakfast table. I set the matchbox down between us. There was a pause. I opened it and poured the pills out onto the tabletop.
If Tommy had been really clever, he would have confessed everything right then. But he thought he could lie his way out of it. “Those aren’t mine.”
“Then why were they in your bedside table?”
“Oh, one of the guys was showing them off last week and left them behind in my room,” he said with a great show of casualness.
I sighed. “Tommy, don’t lie.”
“I’m not!”
“You are, damn it! You shouldn’t have the pills, and you shouldn’t lie to me about it! This is serious, Tommy -- where did you get them and why?”
He sat there, trying to remain poker-faced but blushing scarlet. Finally he said, “I found them.”
“You found them? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! Tommy, this can be a dangerous drug. You could seriously harm someone with it. Now for the last time, where did you get the pills?”
Silence.
“All right, Tommy, that’s it. You’re grounded. No going out, no phone, no netting. When you’re at home I want you in your room unless it’s dinnertime. No skateboard team or drama after school.”
He got up, still silent, and went to his room. One by one I picked up the pills and put them back into the matchbox.
*****
The first royalty check caught me by surprise. I had signed the patent agreement when I was working in Dave’s lab, but hadn’t really been paying attention. In academia you think about publications, not patents. But a check for eight hundred dollars is nothing to sneer at, so I put it into the bank and took Jonathan out for dinner to celebrate. The next month a bigger check came. And a bigger one the month after that. People were buying Efracol. At first I was puzzled; I hadn’t thought there were so many women with sexual problems.
Evidently I wasn’t the only one puzzled. A Los Angeles Times reporter named Jennifer Bartholemew spent six weeks cruising the club scene on an expense account and wrote a series of articles called “The Seduction Pill.” She discovered that women weren’t buying Efracol -- men were. They were using it to get women to sleep with them.
The reaction was worse than I’d ever expected. Just about every church came out against Efracol, and so did the National Organization for Women, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Greenpeace. All the newspapers printed worried editorials, and Newsweek ran a cover story called “Is Science Out of Control? The Efracol Controversy.”
For some reason, the reporters weren’t all that interested in Dave Zhao or Will Wiener or the other men on the Wellaxo team. I was the one they all wanted to interview. The cheap irony that a woman had “invented” Efracol was impossible for the media to resist.
I managed to duck the television people, but there was one harrowing interview on Pacifica radio. It was a three-way discussion with me in the local radio station in Chapel Hill, pitted against a bioethics guru in Cambridge and a DEA agent in Washington. The Federal agent was fairly polite, but the ethics man kept referring to Efracol as a “mind control substance” and speculated that it could ultimately reduce women to the status of slaves. Afterwards I wondered if maybe that was wishful thinking on his part.
The worst interview was with a girl writing for one of the local college papers. She obviously hadn’t read my original paper or the draft of the Scientific American piece that I’d sent her by email. The first hour of the interview consisted of my explaining things she should have already known. Then she threw the grenade.
“It all comes down to one question, Dr. Pickens: why?”
“Why? Why what?”
“Why did you invent Efracol? You must have realized how it could be used to harm women?”
“I didn’t invent it, I discovered a natural brain chemical which plays an important role in the sexual response of mammals. And I did it to improve our understanding of how the brain works.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“What do you mean?”
Her voice dropped low, heavy with faked compassion. “Have you, Dr. Pickens, ever used Efracol?”
That was when I walked out -- which was kind of awkward since it was my office. I had to ask the departmental secretary to get my briefcase and my computer. But how could I stay and admit that yes, I had tried it not long after the clinical trials, and that yes, it had made me desperately horny for a couple of hours? Not exactly the white-coated image I like to project. When the story finally ran it described me as “aloof” and “prickly,” and made much of the fact that I was still nursing Natasha at the time.
I did get a favorable column in Hustler.
Congress got the FDA to put Efracol on the list of Schedule II controlled substances, available only by prescription. Of course, Congress and the FDA couldn’t stop sleazy doctors from prescribing Efracol by the bushel basket to their male patients. Nor could they do anything about the string of clinics dispensing Efracol that sprang up in an unbroken line from Tijuana to Matamoros. Or the brisk trade in pirate Efracol between Cuba and Miami. Or the dozens of Web sites telling how to make DBCA in your basement with common household chemicals (only two of them were at all accurate; most were simply wrong and at least one was horribly toxic).
There were reports of Efracol parties, with guests taking big fistfuls of Viagra and Efracol (sometimes even both at once). A candy company made millions selling triangular chocolate candies with a green glaze. A mail-order company in Hillsborough came out with little foil packets containing a condom and a Efracol tablet.
In 2003 alone, Wellaxo sold more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of Efracol, and one report claimed the unlicensed knockoffs produced in Russia, India, and Colombia made twice that amount. My share of the patent royalties amounted to ninety thousand dollars a year.
Duke offered me an assistant professorship, with a fat salary and a lab of my own. Being a famous scientist has its perks -- and a faculty member who’s also a potential big-money donor is always welcome at any university. We bought a bigger house right near campus and Jonathan quit his newspaper job to start writing Civil War books.
With funding from my own pocket I could study whatever I chose. I dropped DBCA completely and began researching neurochemicals in fish and amphibians, delving into the chemical evolution of the brain. A nice, safe topic.
*****
Jonathan got back at six, smelling faintly of old paper. He had spent the day in the UNC library, reading crumbly letters written by Confederate soldiers. He was working on a book about free black soldiers in the Rebel army, and had been scouring every archive from Richmond to New Orleans for sources.
I met him at the door. “Jon, I found these in Tommy’s room.” I handed him the matchbox full of pills.
He opened it, studied them for a moment, then looked at me. “Is Tom home?”
“He got back a couple of hours ago. He won’t tell me where he got them.”
“Hardly matters, anyway. We know he didn’t get them from the doctor. Probably one of his friends.”
“I told him he was grounded until further notice. What are we going to do about this?”
Jonathan sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Confiscate them, I guess.” He started to head for our office but I stopped him.
“This is serious, Jonathan. It’s not some amusing little boyhood prank. What if he tries to give them to Megan?”
“I don’t know if we should do anything. He’s sixteen, for God’s sake. You weren’t a virgin at that age, and I sure didn’t want to be. He’ll be careful. After all, he’s been hearing about using condoms all his life from school and TV, and I’m sure Megan has, too.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say? Good luck and don’t forget your condom? Shouldn’t we at least tell her parents?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Christ. What do you want me to do? Act like some Puritan patriarch and tell him to stay chaste until marriage? Or get Megan’s folks to put her in a convent, maybe? This is the twenty-first century, Claudia. There are kids younger than Tom and Megan having children of their own.”
“It’s not him having sex that I’m worried about. It’s the pills. Do you want your son using drugs to make some poor girl want to sleep with him?”
“Some poor girl can make him want sex without pills!” He chuckled but stopped when he saw I wasn’t laughing. “And why does she automatically become a ‘poor girl’ anyway? Is it such an ordeal, having sex with a man?”
Jonathan and I had been married for nineteen years, and I don’t think he had ever surprised me quite as much since he proposed. I don’t know what I expected his reaction to be, but it certainly wasn’t the one I got. “Using the pills to make her want sex is just as bad as forcing her. It’s like rape.”
“Then why isn’t it rape for a woman to get a man aroused? Come on, Claudia, you sound like some of those paranoid editorials. It’s a natural chemical, remember? If a boy with an erection and a case of blue balls is supposed to know that ‘no means no’ after two hours of necking, then a girl dosed with DBCA can refuse just as easily.”
“You really don’t see any difference? So if Tasha goes to a party with Efracol in the punch and gets gang-raped, it’s all right with you?”
That got him mad. He stomped off to the office and slammed the door, and didn’t come out until dinnertime.
*****
The first death caused by an overdose of Efracol was in 2004. A girl in Los Angeles drank a lime daiquiri which her date had laced with an entire bottle of ground-up Efracol tablets. In large quantities, DBCA can cause seizures, paralysis, and heart arrhythmia. Within days of her death, the story was going around that she had been killed by the ultimate orgasm. Two cases of self-administered overdoses followed.
A student at Florida State University was raped by eight members of the DKE fraternity after being given three Efracols dissolved in a cup of punch. A high-school girl in Seattle died of internal bleeding after having sex with more than twelve boys in three hours at a party; she had consumed nine Efracol tablets beforehand (along with three hashish brownies, a nitrous-oxide cylinder, and five cups of bourbon).
On Long Island two men and a woman were found to be running a prostitution ring at a cheap motel, using Efracol to recruit girls. The woman invited local high-school girls to “dance parties” at the motel, where they were served soft drinks containing DBCA smuggled in from Cuba. Male “guests” paid a hundred dollars each to attend the parties.
The student orientation packet at Duke began to include a little flyer called “Be Safe! Know What You’re Drinking!” It warned female students to avoid mixed drinks or any beverage served in cups. “Drink only from cans or bottles that you open yourself. NEVER let your drink stand open.” A friend on the faculty at Stanford sent me a similar brochure, which advised women students simply to avoid eating or drinking anything when men might be around.
*****
It was my turn to make dinner, but I was too upset to cook, so I finally just ordered pizza. It was a very quiet meal. Tommy ate six slices with great efficiency, then excused himself and went back to his room. I couldn’t even taste what I was eating. Natasha kept up a running monologue about the rabbits in her classroom at school, and Jonathan listened with polite interest. After dinner Jonathan retreated into the office again and I clicked aimlessly around the cable channels while Tasha did homework on her pad.
At nine-thirty I supervised her bath and preparations for bed. As we said goodnight I found myself wishing she could stay nine forever, innocent and happy, safe from little green pills.
Though it was not yet ten, I got undressed and went to bed. Jonathan was still sulking in the office. I lay there restlessly, refighting our argument in my head. After a few minutes I just couldn’t stand it any more. I got up, pulled on jeans and a shirt, got his keys off the dresser and went out.
I drove around for a little while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. I found myself on 15-501, heading for Chapel Hill, so I followed the road into town and parked in one of the city garages on Rosemary Street.
I walked over to Franklin Street. Students from UNC and all the nearby colleges were everywhere, enjoying the warm spring night. The line at the ice-cream parlor stretched halfway down the block. What I really wanted, I decided, was a drink.
The bar down the street wasn’t as crowded as I had feared. To my chagrin the bouncer waved me in without even looking at my driver’s license. Inside the crowd was mostly seniors from UNC and Duke, with a scattering of grad students and some actual adults.
I ordered a Bloody Mary and got a seat at the bar, next to a couple of physics students arguing about warp drives. They ignored me as I sipped my drink and watched the room.
There were three young women at one of the high tables along the opposite wall, alternately scanning the crowd and bending heads together for a private conclave. Like most of the other women, they were drinking bottled beer. I noticed each girl kept a thumb over the opening of her bottle when she wasn’t drinking.
Two boys with unsuccessful beards stopped by to chat with them. Pleasant nods, dim smiles. The thumbs stayed on the beer bottles. After a few minutes the boys moved on. The girls conferred and laughed.
About twenty minutes later one of them looked at the door and nudged her companions, then waved at a broad-shouldered young fellow with large dark eyes and perfect teeth. He came over to talk, and soon the girl who had waved was ignoring her two companions, practically hanging on his every word.
She took a sip of her beer and very deliberately set it down on the table, leaving it open and unprotected. A little while later she went off to the powder room with her two companions, leaving the bottle there. The boy didn’t do anything to it, but when she came back the two of them went out together. The other two girls stayed behind.
*****
Fortunately for me, fame doesn’t last. Occasionally some reporter would give me a call when a spectacular sex crime made headlines, but a policy of refusing all interviews eventually got them to leave me alone. Not that I was ever a public figure. Nobody ever recognized me in the supermarket or asked me for an autograph.
My email folder still gets about ten messages a week from a hard core of fundamentalist Christians and radical feminists. I can spot them right away, as they usually have titles like “YOUR GOING TO HELL” or “60million women raped eachyear by efracol” or the occasional “Efracol Kills!” I forward the more threatening ones to Campus Security. So far, none of the writers has done anything but threaten.
At parties I talk only about my current research, although invariably some idiot will bring up Efracol and ask me about the latest spectacular sex crime. That’s one reason I don’t go to many parties.
And I still get a royalty check once a month. Sales of Efracol have leveled off in recent years -- the number of legitimate users is fairly steady, and I don’t get any percentage of the illicit market. But it’s still worth about twenty thousand dollars a year to me.
On nights when the moonlight outside makes it too bright to sleep, I lie awake wondering if it’s tainted money. Am I living in comfort because women are being abused? Does Dave Zhao ever feel this way?
Could I have suppressed it? Maybe. For a while, anyway. But I didn’t invent the DBCA molecule. It was there all along, in the brain of every mammal, just waiting to be isolated and described.
Maybe I should have looked into the chemical basis of guilt.
*****
Jonathan was in bed when I got back, reading Smithsonian and clipping his toenails. He looked up at me but didn’t say a word about my little excursion.
“I’m sorry for what I said this afternoon,” I began. “We really do need to decide what to do about Tommy.”
“I told you what I think. Evidently it wasn’t enough for you. How much punishment do you think he needs? Career opportunities for eunuchs aren’t what they used to be.”
“Maybe some kind of counseling?”
“There’s a real punishment for the kid -- make him spend two hours a week in a room with some Psych major trying to help him get in touch with his feelings.” He looked at my face and his smile faded. “Sorry. But I don’t think he needs counseling. I mean, he’s a sixteen-year-old boy. He’s desperate to have sex. Now offer him a magic pill that will make girls want to go to bed with him; how can he refuse? It’s what every teenage boy dreams of. When I was his age I would have sold my soul to the Devil for something like that.”
“But it’s not right!”
“Why not?” Jonathan was getting annoyed again.
“Because it isn’t. The pills take away the girl’s free will.”
“No they don’t. No more than deep kissing and blowing in her ear do. Think of it as chemical foreplay.”
“It isn’t the same thing, damn it! She doesn’t choose to take the pills. It’s as bad as giving her tranquilizers and then raping her when she passes out.”
“You keep calling it rape! Since when is it rape when the woman actively wants to have sex? Was it rape that night after the blues festival? Or in your aunt’s basement? Or a thousand other times?”
“But all those times I wanted you because I love you, not because you put something in my drink!”
“Are you sure I didn’t?”
For a second I went cold all over. I felt as if I was about to throw up. My expression must have been really something, because Jonathan got up off the bed in a hurry and took me in his arms. “I’m sorry, Claudia. God, I’m sorry. I’d never do that. I’m so sorry,” he said over and over.
“I know,” I said at last. “You just scared me for a second.” He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke I realized he had been crying. “I get it now,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll explain it to Tom.”
*****
The next day Jonathan picked up Tommy after school and the two of them went off to Duke Forest together. When they got home with a bag of take-out barbecue for dinner Jonathan was determinedly cheerful and Tommy was very subdued.
Jonathan told me about it while we were getting ready for bed. “I talked a lot about trust and respect and how using the drug was a kind of betrayal. He didn’t know what I was talking about. It turns out Megan was taking the pills herself; he wasn’t slipping them into her drink or anything.”
“She knew?”
“Apparently it’s no big deal for them. It’s just another chemical tool in the toolbox. Caffeine to stay awake, steroids to bulk up, beer to get silly, and Efracol to get hot. It’s like popping a disk into a computer.”
“I’m not sure I like that any better.”
“Me neither -- it’s a bit of a shock to hear my wildest teenage fantasy described as no big deal. But I guess it makes sense; Tom and Megan are part of the first generation to grow up with Efracol. It’s a whole new world.”
“More like a Brave New World.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I read him the riot act about obeying the law and being honest. I don’t think that will be a problem; Tom’s smart about following the rules.” He sighed. “He was so practical about it all. I feel old and bewildered.”
I cradled his head on my chest. “Would you have tried to slip me Efracol when we were going out?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Do you hate me for it?”
“No.” I suddenly laughed. “But it wouldn’t have done anything. My brain was steeped in DBCA the moment I met you.”
“Scientists are such sweet talkers.” He rolled over and gave a sigh. “So in thirty years are Tom and whoever going to be popping Efracol when they want a quickie? Or will this go the way of nose bangles?”
“I don’t know.” It felt good not to know. I no longer felt responsible. For better or worse, the world could handle Efracol without my help. “Goodnight.”
Jonathan was already asleep.
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