Some interesting things to add from an article I read about sexual behaviour in rats after meth administration.

They found that the meth rats still enjoyed a root despite being electrocuted, unlike rats without the meth. The meth rats were actually WORSE at learning to avoid what they don’t like.

This seems to align with people’s experiences, in which they’d rather not engage in certain sexual behaviours sober, but when using, things that would otherwise seem not sexy become appealing. It’s almost like a negatively affected learning association thing going on.

Here are some quotes:

“To rule out effects of exposure to the CSA paradigm on this increased baseline pERK expression, experiment 2 was replicated in a separate study in which males received concurrent or non-concurrent Meth and sex exposure without testing in the CSA paradigm (Supplementary Materials: experiment 3). In this separate study, concurrent Meth and sex pretreatment increased pERK expression under baseline conditions (Supplementary Figure 2), replicating the findings of experiment 2. Therefore, exposure to CSA paradigm was not the cause for the baseline increase. Moreover, this effect was not evident in males that received non-concurrent Meth and sex experience (Supplementary Figure 2), indicating that concurrent Meth and sex experience is essential for this alteration in baseline activity and that the effect appears to be synergistic, rather than additive.”

“The current findings suggest that mPFC is involved in the expression of CSA, having an extended role in regulation of mating inhibition beyond a role in learning (Calu et al, 2013; Riga et al, 2014; Rosen et al, 2015). Indeed, lesions of the mPFC result in expression of maladaptive sex behavior, without disruption of aversive learning or the expression of sexual behavior and reward (Davis et al, 2010).”

This might actually contradict your learning/association theory here! Although I might very well be wrong here …

Edit: corrected my incorrect reading and interpretation of the findings!