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UNITED KINGDOM, August 30, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The damage of porn addiction is striking at an astonishingly young age, as a 15-year-old British youth recently came clean about becoming hooked on Viagra in order to live up to the sexual expectations created by constantly and compulsively viewing hard-core pornography on his cellphone.

Encouraged to go public by his counselor, Steve Pope, and his parents, from whom he stole hundreds of dollars to feed his need for the potency-enhancing drug Viagra, the unnamed youth says the addiction has destroyed his life.

“I feel I have no childhood now. It is ruined,” he told the Daily Mirror. “It was just me, a kid, being silly enough to believe I would never be able to have good sex without a tablet. But suddenly I’d ruined everything.”

It began, he recounted, with Internet porn that he watched on his cellphone, beginning at age 12. Worried that would not match up with a prospective date because of the performers he saw on his phone, he took the advice of older classmates to use Viagra.

“I wanted to be like the men in the clips, so I took the pill I was given. I didn’t tell the girl because I didn’t want any more pressure. About 10 minutes after I took it, it started to work. I felt a bit out of control. But the girl didn’t laugh at me and that felt good, so I told her what I’d taken. She asked how soon I could get more.”

But the next pill and all the rest he took for several years cost nearly US $6 a pop, roughly his week’s spending money from his parents. So he took to looting his mother’s purse to get the high he experienced — and the erection. “I felt horrible, but in my mind I had no choice – not taking Viagra wasn’t an option. I was disgusted with myself, but I didn’t know how to control it and I was terrified my parents would find out.”

Eventually, he said he needed five or six pills a night and became even more terrified of the physical side effects. These include, according to the rxlist.com, “sudden vision loss, ringing in your ears or sudden hearing loss, chest pain or heavy feeling, pain spreading to the arm or shoulder, nausea, sweating, general ill feeling, irregular heartbeat.”

He confessed to his parents, who quickly got him counseling. Pope, the therapist, said, “He is brave for speaking out because he is a victim here, but he is by no means alone.” The boy said a third of his male classmates have tried Viagra, which is readily available in the schoolyard and street, and can be ordered over the Internet.

“There is a real lack of awareness about the impact of pornography, the sexualization of ­children and the way this is making Viagra a drug of choice in some schools,” Pope warned. “Every young boy these days sees porn from a very early age and that’s what they expect sex to be like – going on for hours.”

The link between Internet porn and youthful impotence is only lately being explored by researchers, according to a 2013 article in The Huffington Post, “Youthful ED: More to the Story,” by Marnia Robinson. She cites a 2012 Swiss study that found 30 percent of young men (with a mean age of 19 years) suffering some erectile difficulty and a 2013 Italian study indicating a quarter of young Italian males had ED, half of them with severe cases. As a comparison, U.S. findings from 1948 show only 3 percent of men under 48 with ED.

The problem leading to an increase in impotent patients, many psychotherapists say, is that contemporary young men have learned to be aroused by Internet porn so thoroughly that many cannot perform with flesh and blood partners. On top of that is a spiritual illness posing as an emotional one. According to the FightTheNewDrug.org website, pornography leads to superficial satisfaction that begets “emotional emptiness.”

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