Drugs
Drug use in porn follows the pattern in the general population.
In a couple of hundred visits to sets, I've never seen anyone use anything harder than marijuana (but I'm not good at picking these things up).
I heard that when Bruce Walker applied for a job at VCA around 1990, he was asked by owner Russ Hampshire for his work background. Walker reportedly replied, according to his widow Lynne Lopatin, that he'd spent ten years smuggling heroin in and out of Asia. Russ hired him.
On January 23, 1998, Zane Entertainment hosted a premiere party for Backstage Sluts at a Hollywood nightclub named Opium Den.
Eden Rae remembers a fellow performer telling her that she used drugs to escape pain. "She is clean now, and has a different feeling about herself, and what she does now, and that's the key. Coke takes the hoist out of the mainsail as well. I doubt that is what the actively hard guys are doing. I also doubt it is meth, for its ability to sometimes minimize the pointy organ. While some chemistry can make the erection prolonged, others make it try to crawl back in. The last guy I saw who MUST have been high, I expect on meth, (tho I didn't see any sign it was brought to the set), was chewing his mouth and couldn't get it up with bailing wire and popsicle sticks. Coke rarely makes its users chew themselves raw while high."
"Yes, drugs are a part of porn," says ex-porn star Holly Ryder, "and although the point can be made that drugs are found in many other industries, I do not know of one with as much innate drug pressure as the porn industry. Even the music industry (well known for it's drug habit) does not compare with the porn industry. I am not saying that everyone in porn does drugs, I'm just saying that there is a powerful presence and a constant pressure to do drugs while in the industry."
In Gourmet Video's Real Estate, released around 1983, Steve Douglas aka Steve Rossi aka Stephen Raye reached for a small vile and started snorting something. As he snorted, Cara Lott went going down on him, and he yelled at her for too much teeth. Robert Black's videos in the late '90s also show drug use.
While personalities like Bill Margold outwardly condemn drugs, they take it for granted that most of their peers indulge at times, and hence rarely attempt interventions.
Intravenous drug use is the most likely way that folks like John Holmes and Nena Cherry contracted HIV.
Pornographers usually react defensively to questions about drug use in their profession by pointing out that other professions also have drug problems. "It seems as if no one wants to admit that there is a certain truth to the (admittedly cliched) stereotype that porn starlets are emotionally damaged and physically exploited by the industry," writes Rob, a publisher, on RAME. "How many times have we heard a story like Nena Cherry's? And was anyone really surprised that the shootout at EA could happen? Yes, there are people in other professions who suffer similar fates, but we have to admit that the porn industry is a unique and obviously dysfunctional industry, which must have its own unique and dysfunctional problems. Comparing adult films to Hollywood seems a little naive when you look at the wide differences in how things are handled."
"Another angle to consider is the number of self-described "victims" of porn," writes Bushmiller, "who say they were totally whacked their entire porn career. This certainly peaks the interest of curious and leads to these threads. I've never heard of someone, for example, saying: 'Man, I know I was sleazy lawyer for six years but part of the reason is I was f---in' whacked on smack.'"
Brad Williams: "What happens if you get caught doing drugs in your Wall Street office? You get your ass fired and won't be working on Wall Street again, and maybe sent to jail even. What's the absolute worst if you use drugs on the set in porn? MAYBE you lose that one job, and you go to work for someone else the next day. Do porn companies now drug test on the set? Do directors/producers call the cops when a performer sneaks off to the bathroom to snort a line? The consequences are so much worse at your mythical Wall Street brokerage firm than on one porn set that anyone with a clue would know which would be greater.
"The same goes for life-off-the-set. Any business dominated by people under 30 with cash in their pockets is going to have more drug users than a mainstream business that drug tests before you're even hired and maybe randomly afterwards, and is not predominantly young singles."
Porn fan Herewegono spots significant signs of drug use in porn videos. "Dirty Tricks(#3 I think) the one with Candy Apples and Ariel Day getting ass f---ed by Jake Steed. Candy Apples is so wired her jaw looks like Howdy Doody with a broken hinge, grinding back and forth. She must have smoked about an 8 ball before coming to set…
"Tricia Devereaux in one of the Robert Black movies, obviously when they were going out, it might have been Ass Gas or Glop it had a very intimate scene between Robert Black and Tricia in a bedroom… There are many shots where some white residue is evident under Tricia's nose and Robert finally notices it and wipes it away. She realizes what he's doing and they share a fleeting moment of eye recognition and a smile.
"Another example is rather vague but it was in one of the Dirty Debs where Ed asks his camera person, who I think is Bonita, very quietly to stop sniffling off camera. But also in the Ed Powers genre what is that whole "Lovin' Spoonfuls" reference supposed to be interpreted as anyway? I mean jeez there's a picture of Ed grinning holding a spoon filled with white stuff which is allegedly jism. YEA RIGHT. Hello! Subliminal advertising saying that his girls get coke to be in his movies so step right up amateurs. Also this is a rather obscure movie called "All Over Me" with Skeeter. In this movie Skeeter is suffering from the same unhinged jaw thing that Ms. Apples suffers from in Dirty Tricks." (RAME)
7/23/01
Porn Websites Used To Sell Drugs
From StraitsTimes: SOME international drug gangs in the region are using sex to sell their drugs to addicts. They have set up pornographic Internet websites as channels for their customers to contact them, as this is more discreet than offering drugs for sale in drug-related websites.
The Straits Times learnt that most of these sex-and-drugs websites are hosted overseas, in countries where pornography is not an offence. By using the sex websites as fronts, the gangs can also avoid attracting the attention of the local police.
The trend apparently surfaced recently as a result of intensive multi-national operations launched by countries in the region. Only regular clients can access some of these websites, which require passwords. These clients can also contact the syndicates by e-mail, using the links provided on the sites. They are able to buy such drugs as Ecstasy, cannabis, heroin and cocaine on the sites with a credit card.
The drugs are sent to them in ordinary-looking envelopes, so they look like regular mail. It is understood that the syndicates which host these sites sometimes use the sites to strike deals with each other.
According to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, sex and drugs are big business for many international crime gangs. For example, in Japan, the Yakuza are said to make billions of dollars annually by selling sex and drugs, both in cyberspace and on the streets.
Earlier this year, drug gangs in Bangkok were found to be using the Internet to sell their wares. In one of the cases which was busted with the help of the American Drug Enforcement Agency, the syndicate sold heroin using a pharmaceutical website as a front.
TALES FROM LUST ANGELES - "SHE'S NOT CLEAN!"
by Rodger Jacobs
(Editor’s Note: As a rule porn stars engage in an enema before succumbing to any form of anal sex. But, as this tale from a literally sobering 1997 adventure illustrates, sometimes "shit happens".)
"It's a very angry screenplay," Sharon Mitchell comments, standing by my side in the cavernous soundstage located somewhere in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley, that bleached panorama of strip malls and auto dealerships that was almost destroyed by the great Northridge earthquake.
The screenplay in question is for a Video Team feature, the fifteenth volume in an ongoing lesbian series called No Man's Land. The last eight installments of No Man's Land were written by me under the nom de plume Martin Brimmer.
No Man's Land 15, the segment shooting today, a hot August afternoon, is the story of an unstable porn star's descent into madness, hastened by her dependence on liquor and by the crushing responsibilities of directing an X-rated feature for the first time.
"It's based on a true story," I tell Sharon, "about the time I worked with Pamela Jayne on her first directing gig. She's a crazy-ass bitch and a raging drunk to boot." As I say those words my mouth feels like a hot stretch of two-lane blacktop and my stomach is throbbing in rhythm to the irregularly rapid beat in my chest as a monstrous hangover maintains a steady grip on my central nervous system.
On the movie set a few feet away, Sahara Sands, a lanky, aquiline-nosed blonde, essays the role of Pamela Jayne, launching into an outburst that's directed at her nubile assistant, played by raven-haired Alexis Dane.
"I don't want my movie to be full of sweet, cloying bullshit!" Sahara, as Pamela Jayne, shrieks at Alexis, gripping a dog-eared copy of William Burroughs's "Junky" in one of her slender hands. There are a lot of references to William Burroughs in the movie, one of the authors, along with Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, that I was reading voraciously at this troubled time in my life.
"I want dirt and grime and nastiness and sweat and cum!" Sahara continues, perfectly in character, capturing the real-life Pamela Jayne's hysterical and drunken mood swings to a tee. "I want my movie to be full of the animalistic passion of sex! Do you understand what the f--- I'm talking about?"
"This is too much for me," chestnut-haired Sharon whispers in my ear, slinking away from the set and seeking refuge in the relative peace and quiet of the soundstage lobby.
Sharon Mitchell, known to her friends as "Mitch", is a rather butch looking but feminine porn star who has been in the business since 1975. She is working as production manager on No Man's Land 15 and I took a liking to her from our very first meeting. I trailed her out into the lobby as production commenced inside the stage.
"I just can't stand to hear all that screaming and yelling," Mitch explains to me, "even if it is a part of the script."
"It came from a very angry part of me," I said, without elaborating that every part of my fibre and being was angry. Very angry. Porno was only supposed to be a transitory phase for me, a waiting room in which to ply my trade while I waited for that big break in HOLLYWOOD. The big break never came and like so many others I found myself working in porn exclusively.
"All of my writing is coming out that way lately," I said to Mitch as we puffed on cigarettes and waited for the red light outside the stage door to dim, indicating that they were finished shooting the scene. "After writing a hundred some odd movies I'm getting a little burned out; the stories are starting to get venomous and harder to write."
"You need a break from porno," Mitch says sympathetically. "It's like the other day I got a call from a men's magazine and they ask me if I want to write a monthly column for them. Well, they know that I'm going to school to get my doctoral degree to be a sex therapist or a psychologist so I figure they want me to write a column along those lines; y'know, like a sexual advice kind of thing? Guess what they wanted me to write about."
"What?" I asked blankly, wondering where I was going to find a store to buy my nightly bottle of bourbon once shooting wrapped up later in the evening. As the associate producer I was pretty much required to be on the set until the very last shot.
"Sex toys! They were gonna send me these new sex toys every month and I would write a column about the product!" Mitch snubbed out her cigarette in disgust. "After 23 years in the business that's the last f---ing thing I want to do."
Mitch has been clean and sober for several years now. As she told me about her battles with substance abuse I tried to imagine what it must be like for her to go home every night, turn down the covers on the bed, and fall into a deep slumber without the aid of booze or pills. The concept was alien to me.
"Rodger, can we make one small change in the script?" Sahara Sands requests, sidling up to me during a break in shooting. "You have here in the script that Pamela Jayne drinks bourbon straight from the bottle but every time I've worked with her she was drinking tequila."
"Really?"
"Really. She's a tequila girl."
"I wasn't aware of that. Sure. Go ahead. Have the prop guys find you a tequila bottle."
It's ten o'clock in the evening and we're in the fourteenth hour of production on No Man's Land 15. This will be a one day shoot, a "one day wonder" as it's called in the jizz biz, a 75 minute videotaped feature, complete with story and five sex scenes shot in one long and agonizing day.
Sahara scampers off to find the right prop for her character and I watch through the glass doors of the lobby as a sleek black BMW convertible screams into the parking lot and slams to a stop between two parking stalls. Kimberly Kummings scrambles out of the car, her long, flowing hair as black as the paint job on the imported car she drives.
Kimberly Kummings is a dead ringer for my first love, the one who took my heart and stomped on it mercilessly before vanishing out of my life forever. I had insisted on casting Kimberly in No Man's Land 15 despite the unsubstantiated scuttlebutt that this newcomer to the world of adult videos is nuttier than a fruitcake.
"If she f---s up the movie it's your fault," the director tells me half-seriously as Kimberly dashes through the doors and upstairs to the waiting make-up chair. "You wanted her in so badly, you pay the price if she screws up."
Evening bears down into morning. It is well past midnight when Kimberly Kummings and Nico Treasures, a beautiful young blonde possessed of an inexhaustible sexual energy, appear on the stage for their scene, the last scene to be shot before a wrap is called.
The set is of a dilapidated Mexican cantina, the last haven, in the story, for Pamela Jayne after she is ran out of the business for her fits of alcoholic dementia while directing and performing.
"You want us to f--- on top of the bar?" Nico asks the director.
"Whatever you girls want," he responds politely, "Anything at all so long as you make it hot."
Before the cameras roll Nico and Kimberly block out their lesbian scene. Kimberly insists that they use dildoes and vibrators and she wants Nico to shove a dildo in her posterior while she lays back on the bar.
The director, seated near the video monitor that captures all of the action live as it happens, calls for action and shoots me a nervous glance.
"It'll be okay," I assure him. "Kimberly's a good performer."
"You also told me her tits were real," he hissed back at me. "Look at 'em!" He pointed at the monitor, "They're pumped up!"
"So are the tits on every other girl in this movie," I frowned.
"Ashley's tits are real," he shot back.
"I'm not going to argue with you about whose tits are real and fake, okay? Can we just shoot this and go home?"
The first five minutes of the scene are going down as smooth as a shot of Black Velvet. Kimberly, it turns out, is not particularly into girl/girl action but she gives it her all. She hoists her slender frame onto the bar, spreads her creamy thighs as wide as a canyon and instructs Nico to lube up the long dildo and slide it into her ass.
"What the f--- is she doing?" the video technician almost screams as he observes the gynecological close-up of Kimberly's puckered ass in the monitor. "She's not clean!"
"Not clean" means that Kimberly forgot to indulge in an enema before succumbing to anal sex on camera. As the large plastic phallus invades Kimberly's rectum her bowels howl in protest, a loud passing of wind being the first warning shot across the bow, and she loses control of her excretory functions, depositing a copious amount of fecal matter onto the bar top.
Kimberly rushes to the stage bathroom and slams the door. The girl who tugged at my heartstrings for her eerie resemblance to my lost love took a crap on the bar. I can't even begin to contemplate the symbolic value of that.
Straggling into my suburban home at a quarter past one in the morning, I am not surprised to find my wife and daughter sound asleep. I take a couple of beers and a fifth of bourbon into my office, sandwiched between the master bedroom and my daughter's bedroom, and resolve to get a little work done before retreating to the living room for some reading and relaxation.
Aside from writing porno, I make quite a nice income developing computer databases for various adult film distributors. A database tells a manufacturer how many scenes are in each of his movies, what stars appear in each individual scene, and what sex acts occur in the context of that scene. With this information they can develop compilation tapes, two hour and four hour video cassettes that are nothing but wall-to-wall sex culled from their video library.
Over the course of five years, I have screened over 10,000 hours of hardcore footage on film and videotape. I have seen just about every sex act imaginable that is legal within the continental United States. I have observed every type of woman you can imagine indulging in sexual scenarios so vast and wide and varied that a chronic masturbator would have to beat his meat from here 'til Doomsday to envision all the images that I have seen.
Big tits, small tits, blondes, brunettes, black women, white women, European women, Asian women, Hispanic girls, and girls of mixed racial origin. I've seen them getting dicked in missionary, doggie-style, cowgirl (woman on top facing the man) and reverse cowgirl (woman on top facing away from man) positions. I've seen faces, chins, cheeks, noses, throats, mouths, lips, stomachs, legs, asses, and earlobes coated with semen. I have witnessed anal sex scenes that are so graphic they would churn the stomach of the most enthusiastic hedonist. Lesbian scenes? I've seen 'em all from soft and tender one-on-one to daisy chain orgies of labia licking to all manner of vicious strap-on stickings. I've seen every variation on oral sex that you can possibly imagine, girls who deep throat and girls who lick and nibble at an erect cock like it's a popsickle on a stick. I have watched dozens of interminable "gang bang" movies and sat through God knows how many "couples oriented" x-rated features, and hundreds of so-called "gonzo" movies, which is to say that there is no story, just wall-to-wall sex. Transvestites and transsexuals in hardcore action? I've watched hour upon hour of those cinematic delights as well as endless hours of hardcore gay male movies. I've endured bondage movies, sadism/masochism features and other fetish videos including, but not limited to, movies that highlight foot worship, spanking, enemas, and crossdressing. Thousands and thousands of men and women engaging in sex on camera. Sometimes it seems to me that everyone in America must have appeared in a f--- film at least once in their lives.
But as long as I had Jack Daniels and his carbonated cohorts from the Miller Brewing Company, none of it ever really bothered me. Jack and Miller were always there to lull me to sleep at night, to blot out the image of all those asses, tits, mouths, and assorted body parts that swim around in the muck and mire of my mind. It was the Roman writer, philosopher, and statesmen Seneca who said that drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. Following that line of thinking it seems only right to conclude that I was simply exchanging one form of madness for another as each day came to a close.
And then along came Kerouac and Bukowski and Burroughs and my life was about to change.
Sometime in late 1995 I stopped watching television altogether to quiet down the noises in my head, the repercussive sounds and moans and groans that stomped about in a disquieting march after screening porno or writing porno for eight or twelve hours on end. My evenings would be spent reading. I plowed through the collected works of Aldous Huxley and Jack London in record time and I sopped up the few Fitzgerald short stories and novels that I had failed to read early in my youth.
A friend recommended Beat writer Jack Kerouac's novels and poems. I had avoided Kerouc in the past but when I picked up Big Sur I realized that I made a huge mistake by dismissing him as a pretentious fool.
Big Sur follows the tale of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's fictional alter ego, who attempts to escape the pressures of sudden literary fame by retreating to a friend's cabin in the seclusion of Northern California's Big Sur wilderness. Once ensconsed in the cabin all manner of chaos ensues, not the least of which is Duluoz's nightmarish battle with delirium tremens. This was the literary territory that I loved in my book-filled youth, the adventures of destructive alcoholic writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
The screenplay for No Man's Land 15 was an extension of my preoccupation with the romance of alcoholism, an obsession that began in my youth and persisted until my thirty-seventh year, the year in which this tale occurs.
An acquaintance of mine, a noteable director of erotic films that are almost always centered around the amorous escapades of nurses and stewardesses, is a raging Malcolm Lowry fan. Even I, in my fifteen years of steady drinking and idolatry of boozing scribes, drew the line at Lowry, author of "Under the Volcano" and a juicer of such extremes that no clinical detoxification attempt, including the barbaric apomorphine treatment, would take hold and he was discharged from one hospital after another as a hopeless incurable. The fact that my Lowry-worshipping friend nearly died from a trio of insidious bloodsucking stomach ulcers speaks volumes, perhaps, about his own problems wrestling with the bottle and the stresses of the porn biz.
Another friend told me recently that his live-in girlfriend, a retired porn star turned make-up artist, joined a support group and is now five months sober.
"I used to find liquor bottles hidden all over the house," he told me, "in the kitchen cabinets, under the bed, in her bathroom cabinets, everywhere. But when I started finding them in my bathroom cabinets I told her she had to quit drinking or move out."
Why he drew the line upon discovering secreted bottles in his personal bathroom, when he knew long before this that she had a drinking problem of some magnitude, I'll never know because I didn't ask. Maybe that's his private domain that no outside reality is allowed to penetrate.
Anyway, in Kerouac I found a new literary idol. I breezed through his novels and then began to devour biographical works about his tragic life. A clear cut pattern emerged in each biography -- Kerouac, a horribly unhappy man who could not cope with fame, nor paradoxically with the cruelty of his critics, drank himself to death.
From Kerouac I graduated to William Burroughs, a logical leap of course since Burroughs and Kerouac were friends. Kerouac not only provided the title for Burroughs most famous novel "Naked Lunch" (defined as "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork") but he helped type and edit the manuscript as well.
For several nights on end in December 1996 I would finish up twelve hours of screening porno and then grab a bottle of bourbon and retire to the living room to wade through "Naked Lunch" while my wife watched her TV sitcoms and melodramas in the bedroom and my daughter slept peacefully in her own room. Although I hadn't switched brands, the bourbon I was drinking seemed unusually harsh, burning the shit out of my esophagus and doing an equally fiery number on my stomach. I simply mixed it with soda water to alleviate the sting.
When "Naked Lunch" progressed from a fascinating record of the agony of life on heroin to a series of ghastly scenes based on the fact that men have erections and orgasms when hanged to death, I put the book down and never picked it up again. It was too much to endure after watching naked bodies writhing in mock passion all day long.
Through Kerouac and Burroughs I was learning that there was nothing romantic about chemical dependency, a lesson I wish I had learned before I picked up Fitzgerald and London and Hammett and Faulkner, and all those other talented bastards who made drinking seem so integral to a rich and full life.
Addictions, all addictions, are potential murderers, thieves of the brain and soul, and after reading Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs I had a real craving for the first time in my life to STOP abusing alcohol.
But I couldn't. Not yet.
"JESUS f---ING CHRIST!" I shouted one evening, jumping out of the recliner and clutching my chest where a fire certainly seemed to be brewing. The first fear was that I was suffering a heart attack. But then I felt an awful bile rising in my throat and I immediately recognized the symptoms of chronic gastrointestinal stress.
So I switched to beer. But that wouldn't give me the buzz sufficient to sleep.
So I switched to wine. Yes, I would only drink wine from now on because the bourbon was clearly starting to f--- around with my stomach. But the morning after from a liter of Merlot was just as treacherous and painful as any hard liquor hangover.
The simple fact of the matter was that I could not drink anymore. I had every symptom of gastroesophageal reflux (splashing of stomach acid up onto the lower end of the esophagus), a disorder that has afflicted almost everyone in my family on the maternal side.
After fifteen years of nightly dances with the bottle I quit cold turkey. There was no Ray Milland-ish Lost Weekend to deal with, no pink elephants, no trembling hands, none of the horrors that Kerouac, who died of a massive abdominal hemmorhage brought on by drink, was forced to confront because nature or God or the frailties of my body or a combination of all of the above spared me that agony, saved me from taking a self-destructive riff right up to the edge and into the abyss.
So now I am forced to confront the world of pornography stone cold sober. No more drifting through an opaque drakness. Porn is a hazardous enterprise to be engaged in. It's a soul-siphoning conveyor belt that entices the mentally addled to grab ahold of the caboose and come along for the ride; which is part of my point entirely: those who get involved in porno are a little f---ed in the head to begin with. Porno doesn't f--- people up, f---ed up people get involved in porno and get more f---ed up. You don't have to be a genius at subtext to figure out that my drinking problem started long before my ride through Porno Hell.
Well, it's a sober eye that now must be cast upon all those hours of X-rated footage and those live moments when porn stars accidentally move their bowels as the camera continues to roll.
"Something good will come out of all things yet," Kerouac wrote as the last words in Big Sur, "There's no need to say another word."