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The survey also included an open question for respondents to describe freely their experiences with G.

More than 800 gay and bisexual men told their story, many from the UK but also from across the globe, with clusters in metropolitan centres: New York City to LA, Berlin to Sydney, Rome to Bangkok. Of those who indicated, their ages ranged from teenagers to sixty-somethings.

Although anonymous, each respondent will be called a different name to differentiate between them and to document what many have never told anyone, in the hope that they may at last be heard.

The most common reason respondents stated for taking G was to have better sex. Roughly two-thirds cited this motivation. Yet over a quarter (28%) had been sexually assaulted — touched without their consent, awoken with someone inside them, or raped while still conscious. And 82% said they knew someone else who had been the victim of sexual violence while on G.

A third of those who had been assaulted were under 25, and, perhaps surprisingly, the most common setting was not in private homes (just 23%) but in saunas — 37% of which were in such places where other people were wandering around.

Dovetailing this was G overdose, either accidentally or because they had been spiked. Almost half — 47% — knew or suspected they had been given G without their knowledge, let alone consent. And almost a fifth — 18% — reported being given a deliberate overdose. In real numbers, this meant 491 men said they had been maliciously put unconscious. A further 21% said they knew or suspected that they had witnessed someone else being deliberately overdosed.

Given these proportions, the following accounts only begin to unmask the overall picture of sexual violence surrounding this drug. Some accounts are straightforward — they remember, roughly, what happened. Others may never know.

“When I was 21,” said Joe, “myself and a friend had met two guys on a night out who invited us back to their place. We were asked to try G, which we did. I remember saying I felt sick and then when I tried to stand, I just fell to the floor. I was vomiting and trying to get to the door to get some air when I felt myself get picked up and taken upstairs. I woke up completely naked on the floor in the small bedroom and I could tell that I had been abused while I had been passed out. I never reported it as I felt shame for how stupid I had been to let myself get in that situation.”

Self-blame permeates many of the experiences revealed in the survey. They took the drug, or put themselves in a situation where drugs and sex were involved, and so point the finger inwards.

Many described too what happened without using the words “rape” or “sexual assault”, an indication of the extent to which men — and perhaps gay men in particular — do not attach such crimes to their experiences. “I took G voluntarily once at a chemsex party and went under,” wrote James. “I woke to find I was being anally penetrated.”Many were very young when it happened.

“I was given G by my dealer when I was 18,” said Andrew. “It was my first time trying it and I was totally out of it. I met up with a much older man on the tube and I was clearly under the influence … Last thing I remember is the man I met taking me to his house and I collapsed in his living room unconscious. I woke up the next morning completely naked and with bruises all over my legs and buttocks. He said I wanted rough sex and that’s what happened.”

Several men reported contracting STIs during these attacks. “I was raped on G and deliberately infected with HIV,” said Owain. This was how another man, Dylan, became HIV-positive. But there was one other detail he mentioned. “Not only was I raped, I was also — I gather — fisted.”

To witness sexual violence was also traumatising for several who responded to the survey. “The flashbacks I have of being on G is horrifying,” said Matt. “The things I’ve seen people do to fresh university students is deplorable. I’ve seen rape.”

In part, the traumatising effect of this was to see the reactions of bystanders, who either did not help, or worse, colluded.

William described a man unconscious on G at a chemsex party. “He was completely still apart from his feet moving around quite fast, it made me think of when someone is hanged,” he said. “I arrived in the room just as this was happening.”

By “this”, he was referring not only to the overdose but that another man was still inside the unconscious guy. “From what I was told the top had coerced the bottom guy into taking an extremely high dose of G because he wanted him to be totally out of it.” Another partygoer’s idea of helping him, said William, was to give him “mouth to mouth” — that is “blowing T smoke [crystal meth] into his lungs.”

Adam said his drink was spiked in a heterosexual bar and revealed his fear for G more widely among the straight population.

“I suddenly felt incredibly drunk; couldn’t stand up straight, was slurring my words, felt dizzy and nauseous. I then wandered off to the bathroom to try to splash water on my face,” he said. By chance, he stumbled into the women’s bathroom and collapsed in a cubicle. “Had my presence as a man in the women’s room not raised the appropriate concerns, I wouldn’t have been noticed by security. As I was forced to learn, this affects both men and women, at straight and gay bars alike.”

Although not sexually assaulted on that occasion, the risk, wherever G is present, is stark, according to the respondents.

“It’s such a dangerous thing in the hands of people who wish to do harm,” said Simon, who described being deliberately overdosed and raped, as well as accidentally overdosing on other occasions until he suffered convulsions and lost control of his bladder. “It is so hard to take the correct dosage, and the small amount that will take you from feeling good to ‘G-ing out’ [losing consciousness] is too difficult to measure.”

Given this, it is no surprise how many never wake up.

More than a quarter of the G users who took the survey knew someone who had died from the drug. Many had lost several loved ones to G, so the overall number of deaths reported in the survey was 1,910.

But because there could be overlaps, with respondents knowing the same deceased people, there is no way of knowing what the total number of deaths is among those the survey participants knew. And there are many barriers to discovering the number of G fatalities overall, BuzzFeed News and Dispatches discovered.

Because most hospitals don’t test specifically for G and the majority of people overdose without seeking medical help, doctors can’t estimate what proportion of overdoses become fatal. After a death, G is not routinely included in toxicology screens in Britain. Even Inner South London, which covers Vauxhall, one of the epicentres of the chemsex scene, doesn’t include it. Instead, pathologists will decide on a case-by-case basis whether to test for it, but this relies on them making assumptions about the deceased when they may not know much about chemsex or those who partake in it.

Once a coroner has found a single cause of death, there is no legal requirement to look any further. But one study found that 90% of G deaths involved other drugs — chemsex usually involves combining G with other substances — so if another drug shows up in the toxicology screen, G will not be recorded.Share On Copy

Finally, because the official statistics on G deaths are incomplete, the existing data suggest the problem is less significant, providing little incentive for policymakers to make the test routine.

But while the true death toll remains unknown, the devastation caused by G reverberated through the responses to the survey.

“I used G for about a year when partying at the weekends, and of the contacts I made during that year alone, eight have died from overdoses,” said Miles.

“I know of somebody who was dead on the sofa at a sex party,” said Huw. “The party went on for more than a day and nobody bothered to check on him. He’d been dead for two days after a G overdose ... People say it’s like being drunk. It’s not. It’s like being dead, but still walking.”

Bruce said he used to work on the club scene. “Personally, I know at least 10 people that have died from it and add another 10–15 suspected to have died from it,” he said.

“It’s like a roulette wheel of death,” said Francis. “We need to get the message out how dangerous this stuff is.”

Others lost their partners. Dan said friends of his former partner took him back to his hotel room, but they didn’t know what he had taken. “As he slept, he aspirated and went into cardiac arrest,” Dan said. (buzzfeed.com, 5/9/2019)