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For decades, Quaaludes have occupied a peculiar place in the American sexual imagination. Initially prescribed for anxiety and insomnia from 1965, the euphoria-inducing sedatives became the defining sex drug of the 1970s — a product of the sexual revolution and, perhaps, an accelerant of it, and one which offered willing consumers a chemical shortcut around their inhibitions.
In 1973, one senator cited references to ‘ludes as “the love drug,” “heroin for lovers,” and “the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Drug.” The Washington Post wrote in 1978: “Users reported that the white pills prolonged and heightened the enjoyment of sex.” And in 1980, Shel Silverstein sang that Quaaludes might even cause people to “make love to the leg of the dining room chair.” Meanwhile, Anthony Bourdain wrote that despite Quaaludes being “ugly” drugs, they were also fun to take: “The user bops around all night feeling no pain, friendly, happy, warm, with an inhuman urge to fuck anything that walks.”
The party couldn’t possibly last. Amid all the drug-fueled debauchery, there was mounting concern over abuse, dependence and polydrug use overdoses. Federal authorities dumped methaqualone into Schedule I—drugs with the highest potential for abuse and no accepted medical use—in 1984, around two decades after they hit the market. Because pharmaceutical manufacturers had supplied most of America’s supply, the pills effectively disappeared. “The results of the coordinated domestic and international actions were described as a total victory against methaqualone abuse,” the Drug Enforcement Administration said.
Four decades later—thanks to The Wolf of Wall Street, underground chemists and drug-taking connoisseurs—a small new generation is discovering Quaaludes. Could they even make a modest contribution to ending the sex-cession?
“They melt your inhibitions away so much,” says a New York-based SoundCloud rapper who uses “The Quaalude Bandit” as one of his aliases. He asked not to be named for privacy reasons.
The first time he took Quaaludes in a sexual context, “as soon as the tingly feeling on my fingertips started kicking in, I felt this crazy energetical pull towards this woman.” He started flirting “way, way more,” and once they had touched — his sexual partner hadn’t taken ‘ludes herself, that time — the skin-on-skin sensation seemed to hum with an uncommon electricity. “There’s a sensual aspect to it,” he says. “It feels buzzy.”
Around 300mg of methaqualone, the active ingredient in Quaaludes, Bandit says, makes him “hyper-talkative” as he is overcome by a “cheerful-happiness-euphoric effect.” Quaaludes are his favourite drug for sex; he has a custom-made chain which says “Quaaludes 714,” and he believes they are much safer than other common sex drugs like GHB, which carries a perilously narrow margin between intoxication and overdose, or methamphetamine, which is responsible for many unhappy, sleepless nights following its use. “You’re just in the moment way more with Quaaludes,” he says. “I’ll be a little bit louder, a little bit freakier.”
Being an early adopter in this micro-revival has brought Bandit another advantage: scarcity itself can be seductive. “If it’s a girl who’s into drugs, the fact that she can do a drug with me that nobody else has I think intrigues them,” he says. “There’s definitely a lure to it.” He has also found, on occasion, that “when they start kicking in the girl will grab me instead of me making a move, because the inhibitions are gone.”
But with a stash of Quaaludes comes huge responsibility, because the same qualities that made them famous as a sex drug also gave them a much darker history. Their capacity to impair judgement and induce heavy sedation has allegedly been abused. Comedian Bill Cosby admitted in court to obtaining Quaaludes legally with a view to giving them to younger women whom he sought to have sex with.
While Quaaludes are often referenced as an immediate route to sex, some say the drugs did not necessarily conjure sexual desire from nowhere, as GHB might. Some female consumers described them more as an icebreaker, removing whatever stood between existing attraction and acting upon it. “You desire sex more,” a stewardess told a college newspaper in 1972. “But it’s not like these old jokes about ‘Spanish Fly.’ You don’t hop in bed with the first person you see. If you are with a guy that appeals to you, it is more likely to happen, that’s all.”
A dental assistant, however, warned: “It makes you float right into an affair. I have to watch who I take it with as it makes you more susceptible.”
Jack Allocca, an honorary neuroscience fellow at the University of Melbourne and a drug pharmacology researcher, says that there is a specific window where Quaaludes have pro-social and arousing effects, but that this can be fleeting. “After that, people report all sorts of impairment, from erectile dysfunction and disrupted lubrication to simply dozing off,” he says. “It’s not even necessarily that their arousal goes away—they become disinterested. They just want to chill rather than go through the effort of having sex.”
He also cautions that tolerance can increase rapidly—raising the risks of problem use and dependency. The drug also has an unusually long half-life and large doses can leave consumers feeling downbeat and groggy for more than a day afterwards, with some even reporting double vision.
For now, the Quaalude renaissance remains decidedly niche. Methaqualone is nowhere near returning to the ubiquity it enjoyed in the 1970s, when pills rolled legally off pharmaceutical production lines by the millions. Today’s enthusiasts instead inhabit a tiny world dependent on a few clandestine chemists who are catering to people willing to go to significant lengths and pay far more than they would for an ecstasy pill to experience a high that disappeared before many of them were born.
Quaaludes have become less a mass-market “disco biscuit” than a piece of pharmacological archaeology: a legendary trip resurrected for people who have glimpsed fragments of its history through movies, music and stories of ‘seventies’70s excess. And for those determined to find out whether the legend lives up to the reality, there remains one important consideration: taking enough to loosen up, but not so much that you become incapable of doing much at all.
“The dosage is the most important thing,” says Bandit, “and not making an ass of yourself by being physically uncoordinated: You have to be coordinated enough to have sex. You can’t be stumbling everywhere and expect to put it through the mattress with your A game.”