I last posted about it here, and here I am again. Sadly, I’ll be posting about it again in the future too.

Michael Specter’s Higher Risk (in the 5/23/05 issue of The New Yorker) is the latest reminder of how fast we are losing the war against drugs in the gay community.

The meth problem isn’t going away. It’s actually getting worse. H.I.V. infection among gay men who are methamphetamine consumers is out of control.

In Shoptaw’s office at U.C.L.A., he and Reback showed me a slide that said almost everything one needed to know about the relationship between H.I.V. and methamphetamine use: it summarized a survey of how likely certain gay men were to be infected with H.I.V. If the men in the study said that they had used methamphetamine in the past six months, there was a low but significant chance that they would be infected. For men who used it once in a while, the figure was twenty-five per cent. When the researchers interviewed chronic users, the number climbed to forty per cent. Sixty per cent of users in outpatient treatment programs were infected, and for users in residential care the number is nearly ninety per cent.

“You know that slogan from the Clinton campaign?” Reback said. “We have paraphrased it many times: ‘It’s the drug, stupid.’ When you are talking about H.I.V. infection among gay men, it’s the drug.”

And why is that? Here are some reasons:

“The difference between sex with crystal and sex without it is like the difference between Technicolor and black-and-white,”

Yes, if you stop doing meth, you won’t have mind-blowing sex with everyone you sleep with. It sucks. But you get to keep your brain and your life.

“And one shouldn’t forget that crystal methamphetamine also acts—at first—as an antidepressant. People talk about ‘Will and Grace’ and how accepting America is now of homosexuality. That is simply not true. America has come a country mile, I agree. Still, in the state I just left”—Georgia, where the C.D.C. has its headquarters—“almost four out of every five adults recently voted to deny gay men and lesbians the right to even have a civil marriage. We have an awful lot more work to do.”

Seems it does matter what other people think. It matters enough that many are willing to take life-threatening drugs to forget how they are treated in this society.

You can find mind-blowing sex without meth. It’s gonna take more time, but you’ll have the time if you’re alive. More rights and better treatment in society? I hate to say it, but that’s gonna take a while too. However, it’s never going to happen if we manage to kill ourselves off. Meth use is rising in lesbian circles too. It’s “cool.” Everyone’s doing it. Everyone wants to be cool. It’s sad.

More:
*Facts of the Day at 2blowhards.com
*New York’s gay center launches crystal meth campaign
*Concern as gay HIV rate rises
*The Tragedy of Today’s Gays