ΚΑΤΙ ΔΕΝ ΠΑΕΙ ΚΑΛΑ - 15 (α)

Slipped into a drink with a distinctive flavour — Coca-Cola, perhaps, or Lucozade — and the taste vanishes. Just the right amount could flood you with euphoria and disinhibition, heightening sexual arousal, like alcohol drowned in ecstasy. But half a millilitre too much and you can be unconscious within minutes.

If you are lucky, you will keep breathing.

This is the drug known as G, the street name for two almost identical illegal substances: GHB and GBL (which becomes GHB in the body). G is most often used in so-called chemsex situations, where two or more men use it alongside crystal meth and other drugs to enhance sex. It has been taken recreationally since the 1990s, but its routine use as a weapon by murderers and rapists has, like a spiked drink, gone largely unchecked — and its damage overall has been largely undocumented.

Now, for the first time, the scale of G’s harm can be revealed.

An eight-month investigation by BuzzFeed News and Channel 4 Dispatches — for a new documentary called Dispatches: Sex, Drugs and Murder— exposes such widespread levels of G abuse among gay men that many users are calling it an “epidemic” with an array of harmful consequences: addiction, violence, sexual violence, overdose, death, and suicide.

All of this is being facilitated by a loophole in the law through which dealers, organised criminals, and those who wish to rape, kill, and in some cases, profit from sexual violence are able to obtain industrial quantities of the substances from abroad.

The investigation includes the largest-ever survey into G use among gay and bisexual men, forming a study to be published by the University of Cambridge. More than 5,000 people responded, of whom over 2,700 were gay and bisexual men who have taken G. Nearly two-thirds (62.5%) said they had suffered serious problems from the drug, including loss of consciousness, addiction, hospitalisation, and sexual assault.

From the survey and investigation, which includes 133 Freedom of Information requests, BuzzFeed News and Dispatches can reveal:

Sexual violence facilitated by G is so widespread that almost everyone who had taken it said they knew someone who had been raped or sexually assaulted while on it.

Over a quarter had been assaulted themselves.

Young men are being drugged with G and raped, with the abuse filmed and livestreamed over the dark web.

Overdose is so common as to be normalised, or even seen as a “rite of passage”.

One London hospital saw G overdoses almost every day — over 300 in one year.

Deaths from G are being missed because it is not routinely tested for after a sudden death.

To back up the data from the anonymous online survey, BuzzFeed News and Dispatches also conducted more than 140 face-to-face interviews with gay and bisexual men who take G. The interviewees conveyed similar stories, to similar degrees, at similar rates.

The picture that emerged was almost unfathomable in its darkness. The volume of those being victimised is beyond what police and the medical profession could contain.

This is helped by the chemical nature of the drug itself, what doctors and toxicologists describe as the unusually steep “dose response curve” — the minuscule difference between a dose that delivers a desired high and one that kills.

A more lethal phenomenon, evident throughout the investigation, also stops help from arriving: silence. Stigma surrounding sex, sexual violence, drug use, and homosexuality — all exacerbated by the drugs’ illegality — means users and bereaved loved ones often keep quiet. Information that might be shared is being muzzled. Life-saving harm reduction is being thwarted.

In one key area, experts warned, this relates to addiction. Users can quickly fall into physical dependence, but many are unaware that withdrawal itself can kill. Heroin withdrawal, by contrast, is not lethal.

But just one NHS clinic for the whole of the UK is trying to cope with those needing medically supervised G detox: a distinct protocol using a combination of medication developed over the last decade to prevent the seizures that can kill people weaning off it.

Dr Owen Bowden-Jones, the psychiatrist who set up the clinic and who was interviewed for the documentary, revealed that a significant number of the G addicts they treat have been subjected to trauma, usually violent or sexual, with many also experiencing a lifetime of homophobia that undermines the most fundamental of instincts: self-preservation. “GHB is a very effective way of taking away feelings,” he said.

Users frequently overdose. Although the 133 Freedom of Information requests submitted by BuzzFeed News and Dispatches to NHS trusts across England and Wales found that most hospitals do not test specifically for G in overdose patients, four do.

In the year to November 2018, those four hospitals (Blackpool, Portsmouth, King's College Hospital and Guy's and St. Thomas') saw 700 admissions from G. If those figures were representative across the country, this could mean 17,000 G admissions nationwide annually. London’s St Thomas’ Hospital alone treated over 300 people for G in one year. Sarah Finlay, an accident and emergency doctor at St Mary’s, another London hospital (which does not test for the drug), revealed that her department alone saw “two or three” G overdose victims every week.

But many users do not even make it to hospital, and the BuzzFeed News–Dispatches investigation uncovered the reasons why. Those who overdose often start snoring, a sign frequently misinterpreted by those around them that they are “sleeping it off,” when in fact it can be a sign of the respiratory system shutting down.

There has never been a mass public health campaign about this drug.

G is also not part of the routine toxicology testing used after a sudden death to ascertain which drug was responsible. The result, we discovered, is that no one — pathologists, coroners, the NHS, the Department of Health, drugs charities, or LGBT organisations — knows the total, or even a near-approximate number, of overdoses and deaths.

Over a quarter (27%) of gay or bisexual male G users who took the survey said they know someone who has died from the drug. Yet official records show as few as 20 G deaths per year — a figure Dr Bowden-Jones described as a “very large underestimate”.

One final warning sounds: G users, addicts, and the professionals who help them revealed that G is proliferating far beyond gay men at chemsex parties. Heterosexuals, in particular young women, students, and people at music festivals, are buying it too. Such burgeoning popularity among the young heterosexual population is believed to be in part because of its cost — as little as £2.50 for a night out.

“I’ve seen it in a multitude of settings, people from a multitude of careers,” said Sophie, a young female user featured in the documentary who asked to be anonymised. “It’s a social problem.” (buzzfeed.com, 5/9/2019)