ΚΑΤΙ ΔΕΝ ΠΑΕΙ ΚΑΛΑ - 15 (γ)

The survey also revealed how inaction, ignorance, and fear on the part of other people in chemsex settings may be contributing to the death rate. More than a quarter said they wouldn’t intervene if someone was unconscious or having a seizure (28% and 29%, respectively). Only 18% of those who had passed out on G went to hospital. And more than a fifth (21%) said they wouldn’t intervene if someone was snoring heavily, which can indicate the respiratory system is failing.

At parties, when someone “goes under” — also called “G-ing out” — people are afraid of phoning the ambulance. “I have witnessed arguments [about] whether or not to call an ambulance [for] a poor guy who accidentally took an overdose, because the assumption was that everyone present would be arrested,” said Moses.

People also shared their own near-death experiences.

“I almost died a few times myself, once on a train in Slough [in England],” said John. “My mum received a call to say the paramedics were unable to resuscitate me and I was pretty much dead. But thankfully they kept working on me and I managed to regain consciousness. Mentally, I have never been the same since.”

Aiden was admitted to hospital with a G overdose “despite having written down the amount of each dose and the time it was taken” — his attempts, common among users, to avoid taking too much. “When I eventually woke up in A&E I could at first remember nothing about the night before. My memory started coming back slowly, bit by bit. I was expecting my long-term partner to arrive at the hospital. A little later I was shocked to the core when I suddenly realised that that was not going to happen.”

The G overdose had wiped from Aiden’s memory the fact that his partner had died a year earlier.

Fear of the effect that details of a G death could have on family members inhibits discussion about what is happening.

“Friends and lovers [have] died from it,” said Clint. “I know truths about deaths that immediate families don’t know and I am riddled with guilt about this. But I fear that letting them know the truth will taint their views about the deceased.”

Silence pervades while isolation keeps fuelling the habit, a theme running through many of the accounts. Not only current loneliness — a factor in urban life generally — but also as a response to past disconnection: gay men shut out at an early age, bullied or sidelined at school or by their family, unable to express who they were. The closet’s long shadow.

“It was a guy I used to date called Victor,” said Bob. “He had recently lost his job in a new city he’d moved to, and started another, but was struggling to find friends. I saw him posting pictures on Facebook and I was concerned as he was with people I knew were heavy drug users on the scene.”

Victor died from his first time on G, said Bob. “He went for a lie-down because he was feeling unwell and other partiers found him blue a few hours later. I think that loneliness drove Victor to that place and was a huge factor in his death. He was only 21 and I miss him so much.”

Many spoke of how entering the gay scene, and in particular the chemsex scene, they found there was a drug that dispensed with barriers between people, discarding awkwardness or shyness or low self-esteem.

“I hid in the closet until I was 38,” said Anthony. “G provided the feeling of being able to be myself, without any concern about what others thought. It makes you feel attractive, confident, uninhibited, and enhances sex beyond what any human should experience. Thus, it is extremely active, tragic, and deadly in the gay community. I lost everything.”

Many spoke of the benefits of G, in particular compared to alcohol: how cheap it is, how easily available it is (“can be delivered across London faster than pizza”); the fact it is calorie free; the lack of hangover; the ability it grants users to shake off inhibitions, approach men they would otherwise be too shy to, and enjoy sex. The sheer bacchanalia of it.

But G is also described again and again by the survey respondents in haunting, dreamlike terms. “Nightmare.” “Ghoul.” “Ghost.” Men like “zombies”. Walking dead. Seizures. Vomiting. Fitting. Sleeping. Dying. Memories vanishing into blurred darkness. Details atomising. How someone died. Whether they died from G or something else. Who was responsible. All become cloud, a will-o’-the-wisp from a best-forgotten weekend that still taunts them.

Even murder becomes blurred. Did the man who gave their friend too much do it to kill them? Does their intention matter when the fact is they are dead? Are those who did not intervene also culpable?

“A previous Grindr hookup of mine ... was involved in the death of another guy and G was at the centre of it all,” said Gary. It is not clear whether “involved” means murder, manslaughter, or accident. Either way, “the whole mind-fuck of me knowing both the drug and this guy really shook me and since then I haven’t touched anything other than poppers.”

Others lost loved ones to suicide.

“My friend, a gay man, took an intentional overdose of G in 2011,” said Derek. “He was found unconscious in the street, admitted to ICU, but was brain dead. He was kept on life support for a while as he donated his organs. He was 25 years old.”

The stories of other fatalities are too numerous to include: a man who had to tell the parents of one of his friends that their son had died of a G overdose. A man in Bangkok who knew of six deaths during one gay circuit party, none of whom received medical help “because the doctor will inform police after testing your blood”. Another who lost eight friends across London, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

The details overlap, time and again. The regular postings on Facebook — friends of friends, RIP messages for men in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Everyone knowing but not saying what killed them. They detailed various associated crimes too — being robbed while unconscious (“I was spiked; I have some recollection of being taken to a cash machine”), being attacked by boyfriends who have never before been violent — and they describe the depths to which G addiction has plunged them.

Robert is recovering from G addiction. He described why its grip is so tight on the user. “Because the effects wear off so rapidly, the anxiety produced by a dopamine rebound encourages one to take another dose in order to suppress that anxiety,” he said. “People end up adopting a 24/7 dosing scheme.”

Now clean, he added, “I’m so glad I no longer have to find an excuse to have a drink every hour on the hour so that the G withdrawal doesn’t start kicking in.”

Terrence, meanwhile, helped his partner detox from G. “For the first week he couldn’t sleep, would shake, sweat, awful anxiety and depression which lasted at least eight weeks. He had trouble controlling his bowel movements and on a few occasions soiled himself.”

Terrence said he left Brighton to escape the drug scene poisoning gay life there. “G in particular is at epidemic levels,” he said. And it isn’t just in major cities. “It has started to surface in rural areas too. I know three people that have lost their lives to this drug; two from overdoses, one from suicide as a result of an uncontrollable addiction. There was one point last year when every day I was logging into Facebook and friends of friends were sharing pictures and condolences of young victims of this drug.”

The tornado effect of G addiction, flattening everything in the user’s life, was captured by multiple respondents. Craig, 23, charted how it brought him into sex work. “I started really doing GHB at 21, and from then it went on to ruin a lot for me, it makes you lose all inhibitions and changes your personality to an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude. It ruined my relationship of four years as well as escalated to me losing my job from going out on benders 3–4 days long. I got myself into a lot of debt through loan sites.”

Broke, single, and unemployed, Craig became an escort. “I then used GHB in order to escort.” He’s now finally two months clean. “GHB,” he said, “is a very underestimated drug.”

What Mike went on to describe was the “normalisation of G with gay men”, which proves devastating when combined with “no information on how to use G safely”. He called for more research into the drug to ascertain what harm-reduction methods might be possible.

But multiple respondents to the survey described the many ways that users and addicts are aware of risks and trying to mediate them. Mostly by measuring the dose and timing further doses, at one- or two-hour intervals, often using their phone’s alarm clock. One man said he used a system of colour-coded balloons to track what he taken, others talked about using Alexa, Amazon’s voice service: “Alexa, remind me in one hour that it’s G o’clock.”

This does not always work, said respondents: Someone forgets they have taken a dose or accidentally puts two doses in someone’s drink or picks up the wrong drink. “I’ve witnessed entire sex parties go under almost simultaneously,” said Javier, adding, “[the] central London gay chemsex scene is an epidemic and it’s destroying a generation of gay men’s lives.”

Three groups of respondents emerged in the survey: first, those who had delved into the chemsex scene and taken G and those who had not. The former often described the G problem like an apocalypse or nuclear fallout: danger everywhere, acid rain pouring over the LGBT community. The latter had not encountered G or its problems and rejected this depiction. Then there was the third camp: those who had dipped their toes into the G world, had a good time and great sex. Some of these users reacted angrily to questions about its harm, accusing the survey, or the media, of stigmatising or overhyping the problems.

These three perspectives reflect what is the likely reality: Most gay men do not take G. Some take it occasionally and manage it. Others are drowning in G with others drowning too. Such groups do not always overlap much, heavy users mixing only with other heavy users.

But the answers to the survey were not only revealing in their substance but in their numbers. When BuzzFeed News and Dispatches released the survey with one question enabling people to say whatever they liked about G, the expectation was that hardly anyone would bother filling it in.

The replies, some comprising hundreds of words, were enough to fill a book. The outpouring included many desperate to speak out, wanting something to be done, wanting to warn others, terrified about what had happened to them, their loved ones, and what could happen to many more people if this drug is not contained.

One respondent we’ll call Wesley summarised the situation, warning: “GHB has become more than escapism. It’s a ticking time bomb that’s started to blow.” (buzzfeed.com, 5/9/2019)