Yet I do suffer
from being bummed fairly regularly, often find myself lacking
motivation, simply too despondent to do much more than lie
around the house watching Oprah and longing for better days
ahead that I know will never come. Sound familiar, potheads?
Which, actually,
is how I initially came to discover Yohimbe. About a year
ago a mutually bummed female friend of mine handed me a half
dozen Yohimbe capsules with the sales pitch that they worked
sort of like an upper, yet without any of the nastiness associated
with speed. Better, these mood enhancing babies were both
cheap and legal. “Oh, and by the way,” she said
in passing, “Apparently some guys [and gals] use it
as a form of herbal Viagra, sends blood rushing down to the
genitals, they say.”
Thinking this
was just more sales talk, I didn’t make much of the
information. After all, if you listen to the hype, everything
from ginseng to raw oysters to MDA is supposed to work magic
on your bone. I promptly put the capsules away and totally
forgot about them until a few weeks later when I found myself
flat broke and desperately in need of some mood enhancement.
“What the fuck,” I decided, “might as well
take this herbal junk and see if anything happens,”
knowing damn well that the word ‘herbal’ is usually
just a nice way of saying “doesn’t do anything
at all.” I knocked back the recommended two capsule
dosage, grabbed the wife, and head out to engage in one of
our favourite activities while stoned, driving around the
city pointing and laughing at people innocently going about
their daily business. Yet the Yohimbe didn’t seem to
make this activity any more engaging whatsoever. Truth is,
like most other herbal concoctions I’ve ingested, there
were few, if any, noticeable effects at all. Cheap and legal
maybe, but horseshit all the same.
And then, several
hours later, it happened. Sitting on my couch watching Frontline
on PBS it came to my attention that I was, in fact, sporting
a boner the likes I haven’t had since the Olsen twins
hit puberty. I didn’t even make the Yohimbe association.
Nor was I especially horny. It was only after addressing the
situation not once, but TWICE, and still finding myself rigid
as a schoolboy that it finally dawned on me, “Ah yes,
the Yohimbe.”
So how about that?
Yohimbe really does work on one level. Not that it’s
an especially practical solution for those afflicted with
erectile dysfunction, given that, in my case, at least, the
aforementioned miracle only came about many hours after initially
ingesting the stuff. And you can certainly forget about getting
high off it, I finished the rest of my Yohimbe caps and never
got a buzz, only enviable cockstands.
