For sex addicts, the Internet is like crack cocaine, accelerating their spiral of self-destruction and even capturing some who might otherwise resist.

"When I'm surfing the Internet, everything else shuts off," says Brian, 36, a Philadelphia-area professional who is receiving treatment for sexual addiction. "I don't care about anything else. If the phone rings, I certainly won't answer it. I'm very isolated and want nothing to do with other people. It's a solid obsession. As I find stuff, I want more stuff - to the point where 8 to 10 hours in front of the computer at a stretch is not uncommon."

Sex is a basic human drive, an instinctual subprogram installed to ensure our survival as a species. But in our overstimulated, hyperdrive society, sex has been pressed into a variety of roles: recreation, status, and universal sales bait.

Some of us - most estimates put it at 6 percent of the population - are compulsive about sex, using it expressly to relieve stress and reduce anxiety. These people find themselves trapped in a desperate cycle of obsession and self-loathing.

When they act out sexually - the behavior can take a myriad of forms from voyeurism to hiring prostitutes - they feel deeply ashamed. And the only way they can think of to escape that shame is to start thinking about and planning their next sexual release.

For these people, the Internet is a siren's song, pulling them inexorably deeper into their addiction, accelerating the self-destructive spiral.

"The Internet is changing everything," says Patrick Carnes, a pioneer in the field of sex addiction and author of such seminal studies as Don't Call It Love. "We have people who were already addicts who got on the Internet and just immolated. The Internet is the crack cocaine of sex addiction. The impact it is having on people is extraordinary."

The Internet's ready availability is also making sex addicts of people who previously might have resisted temptation. Procuring pornography used to entail visiting an adult video store or lingering by the seedier side of the magazine rack. The threat of exposure was enough to discourage many people.

But now anyone with a modem has access to a vast storehouse of cyberporn (a recent government study identified more than 400,000 Web sites as pornographic) without leaving the house. The inhibition of social censure has been obliterated because the behavior takes place in private.

"It's a Triple-A engine: access, affordability and anonymity," says one of the leading researchers in the field, Al Cooper, who is the clinical director at the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre in Santa Clara, Calif. "Those three factors turbocharge the Internet, giving it a power that is hard to match in other venues.

"The number of people being arrested for child porn has increased phenomenally. I'm convinced many of those people wouldn't have gotten involved if it wasn't for the Internet."

For those with an addictive predisposition, a taste of pornography can grow to an out-of-control obsession with alarming rapidity. The sexual buzz they experience is as strong as any derived from alcohol or drugs - and just as destructive.

"When a person is under the influence, meaning they have been acting out, that person's judgment and cognitive ability to think clearly is absolutely impaired, just as it is with alcohol," says Sarah Ullman, a therapist who treats sex addicts in Wynnewood. "For example: a circuit court judge who is married with five children and goes to a park at night knowing the dangers and looks for anonymous sex. They lose all ability to consider the consequences, just like the drug addict or the gambler. They are in an altered, disassociative state.

"You can have a high-functioning moral individual who will be on the Internet with his wife right in the next room, knowing she could come in. That's how a lot of them get caught. I'm seeing many couples coming in with the wife saying, 'I think my husband is a sex addict.' You never heard that five years ago."

Once aroused, the addict's wanton disregard for detection explains why so many can't resist downloading cyberporn while they are at work, putting their livelihood at risk. A 2002 survey conducted by Websense/Harris Interactive found that more than five billion work hours are lost to cyberporn every year. That's because fully 70 percent of the traffic at sex sites occurs on weekdays between the hours of 9 and 5. This despite the fact that in most offices, even first-time offenders are dealt with harshly.

"No-tolerance policies are where corporations are at," says David Delmonico, an assistant professor at Duquesne University and the editor of the Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity Journal. "You get caught one time with pornography or at a porn site, and you're dismissed because you violated the company's acceptable-use policy."

The scope of cybersex is immense - and growing. Americans will spend $260 million at fee-based adult sites this year, according to the projections of Jupiter Research, a New York Internet marketing research firm.

"Among all people who go online, 25 percent [use the computer to] engage in some sort of sexual activity," Cooper says. "That's 50 million people in the U.S."

More than 34 million people visited adult porn sites from home and work in August, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, which monitors Internet use.

So where do you draw the line between normal and unhealthy use? "We have a couple of parameters," Cooper says. "Generally, those engaging in these activities more than 5.7 hours a week have a problem. When it exceeds 11 hours a week, that's a very clear marker."

"I've spent hour upon hour online," Brian says, "to the point where I would sleep two hours a night before going in to work. And I'd follow that routine for the entire week. It absolutely affects my job performance. And while I'm sleep-deprived and in a daze, I'm also seeing in my mind all the images from the night before."

Much of the data about sexual addiction is sketchy. That's because most sufferers deny and conceal the severity of their habits. Societal attitudes about sex addiction resemble the perception of alcoholism a century ago.

Until Bob Smith and Bill Wilson founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, problem drinking was considered a moral failing, and people were understandably loath to admit it. But as the disease model gained favor, more and more alcoholics sought help.

Sexual addiction is likely to remain stubbornly in the shadows as long as it is stigmatized. Even though, as Ullman points out, "our last president did a lot to bring this issue to the forefront." But people who exhibit out-of-control sexual behavior are still usually treated with revulsion and branded as perverts.

"It's done a number on my family," Brian says. "I still have a relationship with them, but it's guarded on their end. They will visit me, but I'm not welcome to stay at their house."

That's why there is a big push in the therapeutic community to get the malady recognized in the next DSM. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the bible for the mental-health professions. The fifth edition is scheduled for publication in 2010.

The American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM, will take some convincing. "There has been some blurring of the boundary between what is normal and what is abnormal sexual behavior," says Darrel Regier, the association's director of research. "I don't think the research so far has given a clear demarcation."

Several clinical trials are under way to meet this criterion. And the American Foundation for Addiction Research is funding a promising study at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine that uses MRIs to map the brains of sex addicts. "Although their findings have not been published, at some conferences they've indicated that there are differences in the way addicts respond [to provocative images] versus how a non-addict might respond," Delmonico says. "That would suggest it's more than a behavioral disorder. It may have biological and genetic roots."

People who treat sexual compulsivity need no persuasion. "We are finding evidence that people with a solid diagnosis of sex addiction are different neurologically," Ullman says. "There seems to be an abnormality with the right frontal lobe. Not dissimilar to people with OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder]. Sex addiction, OCD and ADD [attention deficit disorder] patients share behavioral traits: the impulsivity, the inability to monitor oneself."

Getting sexual addiction classified as a distinct disorder would result in a quantum shift in terms of the resources available. Insurance companies would be forced to pay for treatment, and employee assistance staffs would be motivated to develop programs.

As it is, therapists such as Alyson Nerenberg in Chestnut Hill resort to cloaking sessions for sexual addiction under accepted diagnoses. "I would tell Blue Cross you have depression or anxiety," she says. "I treat for the other underlying issues you probably also have with the addiction."

Because treatment involves paying for intensive therapy, often out-of-pocket, the profile of the recovering sex addict is currently skewed toward affluent, high-achieving, predominantly white individuals. But experts warn that sex addiction is running unchecked through many ethnic and social groups.

"I would expect the incidence to be quite high, for instance, in the gay and black communities," Carnes says. "Wherever you have oppression and violence, wherever you have people who have experienced profound fear, you will have addiction."

Gender also plays a significant role in cybersexual habits. Men seek out pornography, while women, who now make up 40 percent of all cyberaddicts, gravitate to adult chat rooms. "Women online are looking for relationships. Sex becomes a way of feeling valued," Cooper says. "If a woman isn't getting enough love and attention, imagine what a charge it is for her to get 50 e-mails."

"One of the things we hear from families is that this is going on in their bedrooms while [the addict is] supposed to be sleeping," says Maressa Hecht Orzack, director of the Computer Addiction Study Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. "They are literally having an affair or masturbating while their partner is asleep. When they are discovered, the effect on the family is horrendous."

While the problematic behavior triggered by Internet use takes many forms - compulsive masturbation, obscene phone calls, serial affairs, pornography, exhibitionism, child molestation, and others - sex addicts have one thing in common: destructive formative experiences.

"They come from families in which there are addicts of multiple varieties in the previous generation," Carnes says. "The families tend to be rigid and disengaged, so there is a failure to bond. Then there are abuse issues [physical, verbal or sexual]. And one of the most profound influences is neglect. These are people who learn to live off fantasies."

There are a number of ironies inherent in this affliction. First, everyone in the field agrees that sex addiction isn't about sex. "It's about loneliness," Nerenberg says. "Most of the clients I see are very lonely." Obsessing about sex is a maladaptive attempt to escape for a time from feelings of inadequacy and isolation.

Secondly, for the sex addict, the orgasm is anticlimactic. What he or she craves is not that fleeting flash of physical pleasure but those long intoxicating moments of anticipation, of feverish forgetfulness. They savor arousal, not satisfaction. Besides, almost immediately after orgasm, they plunge back even deeper into feelings of worthlessness.

Finally, sex is the ultimate expression of intimacy. But sex addiction fosters a claustrophobic sense of solipsism. "I'm 38 years old," says Stuart, a Philadelphia-area sex addict, "and I've never really been in a relationship, never really dated. And I'm angry because I feel I've been cheated."

Like alcoholics, cybersex junkies build up tolerance and need to be online for longer and longer periods of time. "When these people are not on the Internet, they feel irritable, a sense that something is wrong," Orzack says. "They can't concentrate, can't get a handle on what is going on in their lives."

Like heroin addicts, they will take desperate measures if they are deprived of their fix. "I had a patient who was cut off from access to the Internet," Carnes says. "He ended up burglarizing the institution he worked for. He broke into offices" to get online.

"I absolutely lose track of time. I'll glance at the clock and then get focused [on the computer screen]. I look up again and it's two hours later," Brian says. "I sit with my face a foot away from the screen. My breathing becomes very shallow. I'm clicking from site to site, trying to find as much as I can. Sometimes I sit back and notice I've stopped breathing."

The toll of the addiction can be devastating. "About 40 percent of sex addicts have lost their partners," Nerenberg says. "They lose jobs. There is AIDs, unwanted pregnancies, abortions. A lot of people experience public humiliation when their behavior is revealed in the media. Many people lose the right to see their children. I've worked with rabbis and ministers who have lost their positions."

Left untreated, out-of-control sexual behavior often leads people to contemplate suicide.

Perhaps of greater concern is the impact that online smut may have on today's cyber-generation of kids. "It scares me to think of adolescent development," Delmonico says. "When I was exposed to Playboy at 13, that's different from the hard-core, very explosive porn teens are exposed to by the Internet.

"We will see a paradigm shift in the arousal template due to the Internet. Seeing a naked woman is very different from seeing people having sex with animals. It may very well shift what kids see as normal sexuality."

If you're concerned about your own behavior, Cooper recommends seeking out a confidante. "Not your spouse. A buddy you can be honest with," he says. "Tell that person the whole truth and see what they think. If they say, 'Everybody does that,' fine. But if they say, 'Damn, you're waking up in the middle of the night to go online?,' then you may have a problem."

Another option is to take one of the online diagnostic quizzes, such as the ones at www.sex-centre.com or www.sexhelp.com.

Fortunately, treatment is available - though expensive. Generally, it involves taking one of the antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), which tamp down the obsessive urges. "You need to initially unhook people from their compulsion so they can start to address the underlying issues," Delmonico says.

"Sex addiction is a different animal than any other because it's your thoughts," Brian says. "Alcoholics, as long as they don't pick up the drink, they haven't relapsed. Sex addiction is about obsession and letting those obsessions take over. It's very difficult."

A course of rigorous therapy is recommended - both group and individual - as well as regular attendance at 12-step meetings such as Sexaholics Anonymous, Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous, and others.

Recovery from sex addiction is often compared to overcoming food disorders, because abstinence is not an option. Sex, after all, is everywhere.

"I get spammed constantly, and I never go to these sites," therapist Ullman says. "If you turn on your computer, you are going to get spammed with porn. It's like an alcoholic living on top of a bar."

Some addicts will switch to low-tech jobs if their situation involves using the Internet. Many have filters installed on their home computers to prevent visiting porn sites. Some sedulously avoid situations that might trigger them, such as going to the beach.

And what is the payoff? What constitutes recovery from sex addiction? "It's gaining the capacity to have intimacy," Nerenberg says. "It's having a fulfilling life where one can connect honestly and with integrity with other people."

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Contact staff writer David Hiltbrand at 215-854-4552 or dhiltbrand@phillynews.com