The Houston Press printed a story last week (February, 2010) of a twelve year old boy with a serious gaming and Internet porn addiction. His parents did not notice. They did not notice the problem when he went to bed with his cellphone and laptop. They did not notice the problem when he woke in the morning exhausted with bags under his eyes. It took a weekend of non-stop Internet porn and masturbation that led to dehydration to wake his parents up to the possibility that he was in trouble.

Dr. Mary Anne Layden is the co-director og the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Therapy. Testifying to the Senate back in 2004, she called porn,  the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today.”

“The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors,” Layden said. “To have drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it — it’s a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind.”

Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.