In a recent Los Angels Times article Hailey Branson-Potts covered
a recent town hall meeting in West Hollywood which covered the risks of using drugs to enhance sex
The topic was a growing crisis, especially in the LGBTQ community, that health experts say is not talked about enough. It is the use of “chemsex,” where using drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine and MDMA enhances sexual activity and lower inhibitions.
Chemsex has become pervasive on online dating apps like Adam4Adam, Scruff and Grindr, where people use code words and emojis to show they want to use or buy drugs and have sex.
One of the town hall panelist said there are “influencers on Instagram with a hundred thousand followers, and they’re doing crystal meth on the side, and no one understands or even knows that and everyone’s scared to talk about it. He also said many young gay men who come to West Hollywood, had not been taught about gay sex and were ashamed by it.
In West Hollywood, methamphetamine was involved in 47 deaths between 2015 and 2018, and meth- related hospitalizations have steadily ticked upward for the last decade, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health thinks that meth has been overlooked as a public health crisis. While it does not have the same national attention as the opioid crisis, methamphetamine in the Los Angeles area is actually incredibly prevalent and incredibly dangerous.
Across the country, overdose deaths involving meth more than quadrupled from 2011 to 2017. Hospitalizations related to meth jumped by about 245%. And throughout the West and Midwest, 70% of local law enforcement agencies say meth is their biggest drug threat.
But policymakers in Washington, D.C., haven’t kept up, continuing to direct the bulk of funding and attention to opioids, said Steve Shoptaw, an addiction psychologist at UCLA in Los Angeles, where he hears one story after another about meth destroying people’s lives. “But when you’re in D.C., where people are making decisions about how to deploy resources, those stories are very much muffled by the much louder story about the opioid epidemic,” he said.
Back to West Hollywood, remember there was the overdose deaths of two black gay men in the apartment of Democratic donor Ed Buck, who was accused last fall of injecting fatal doses of crystal methamphetamine into victims for his own sexual gratification.
In recent surveys of nearly 1,600 people in West Hollywood, more than 70% of respondents said that meth use at community events, bars and clubs is a “pressing issue” for the city, according to the Safe West Hollywood Community Coalition.
The coalition and city employees recently have begun going to major events like LA Pride and West Hollywood’s Halloween Carnaval to hand out free naloxone, a medication that can reverse drug overdoses, as well as condoms and testing strips to determine whether recreational drugs are laced with fentanyl.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the contamination of illicit drugs like methamphetamine with fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin — is a growing public health concern . Often, users are unaware it has been added.
The town hall panelists said that one of the tragedies of chemsex is that it often stems from loneliness and LGBTQ people’s shame around their sexuality or gender identity. In a world increasingly connected by technology, “we’re in a crisis of loneliness.”
There are some strategies that show hope for the use of PREP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) . In a recent HIV conference, there was NO evidence of an association between chemsex and sub-optimal adherence to PrEP among MSM in England. These analyses suggest PrEP remains a feasible and effective HIV prevention method for high-risk MSM engaging in chemsex, a practise which has been associated with an increased risk of HIV transmission.
