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The New Plague - An Epidemic Swallowing Gay America
By Kevin Ivers,
4/15/2002 3:10:15 PM
 
Ten years ago, you couldn't go out with friends for an evening without hearing the latest on who was sick this week, who was in the hospital, who had died, who'd come back from the dead for another week.

AIDS was a feature of everyday life in the typical urban gay setting. If you had it, it dominated your life. If you didn't have it, you were worried about getting it, and the concern did not give you a moment's rest.
You'd vaguely remember what life was like before AIDS, and sort of remember how it seemed to slowly creep up on you until it was everywhere you looked.

Today, the same creeping feeling is beginning to worm its way into our everyday lives. A lethal sickness is spreading through gay America, swallowing up gay men in the prime of their lives, and it's accelerating with the same eerie speed while the mirror balls continue spinning and the beat goes on.

And on January 29 of this year, there was an article in the New York Times, several pages in, indicating that a new epidemic appears to be unfolding that is killing gay men -- much like the 1981 article that heralded the AIDS disaster about to seize our community. It's the worst feeling of deja vu I've ever had.
Today, it is not a virus, but something arguably much worse. It is a different killer with a four-letter name -- "Tina." And without a doubt, this epidemic is a slow version of mass suicide that we can see coming a mile away and yet no one seems to be speaking out.

We can't pretend we haven't noticed that party drugs have come to dominate a growing segment of gay male life, and an entire subculture has begun to form around the party drug lifestyle. It isn't just in American cities small and large, but is now an overwhelming feature in every corner of the globe where a gay "circuit" party somewhere, nearly on a weekly basis, it getting under way.

We can pretend all we want, or spend another week, month, year in denial. But here's the reality that anyone who has been to a gay dance club in the last few months can tell you -- crystal methamphetamine, or "Tina," is slowly becoming a defining feature in gay life, touching nearly every group of friends in every city in America, and ruining thousands of lives with every wave of its destructive assault.
And just like AIDS -- perhaps most like AIDS -- the gay cultural and political establishment is silent as the death toll is reaching a point where we can't ignore it any longer.

The Living Dead

One of my oldest gay friends in Washington, someone who had a hand in my own coming out, used to be a vibrant, adorable, intelligent young man with a great future. Today, he is trapped in a paralyzing addiction to crystal methamphetamine. He is a walking corpse, skin and bones with a hollowed face, who alternates between anguished evenings of sobriety praying he will somehow survive this horror, to hosting marathon orgies of drugs and unsafe sex in his once beautiful apartment that has become almost a cave, with all the windows covered and the floors cluttered with mattresses and paraphernalia that makes me think that nothing goes on in his life that doesn't involve taking Tina and having sex.

We've had a few hushed meetings now and then, where we'd sit at a café late at night and he'd tell me, shaking, about the agony of withdrawal. About the days of insomnia followed by an almost comatose state, wracked with nightmares and hallucinations. He's unable to eat or to focus, and then the deep depression and anxiety sets in. As he sits there with me, trying to sip a latte but unable to eat, counting the hours he's been drug-free, he confesses that I'm one of only two people in town he knows outside his world of Tina. Wherever he will turn in an hour, or in a day, someone will be there with Tina in his pocket, or in a drawer, or on a coffee table, and it will be too easy to take a hit, and then it's all over. In his receded eyes I can see he wants to have hope. But then, not a week later, I hear that he is advertising an afternoon of "PnP" -- standing for "party and play" or a day of drug taking and sex -- in his dark apartment, and I know he didn't make it this time.

And now, he's not the only one. I'll get an email that a friend is in a rehab hospital, or has been rushed to a hospital in a coma. I'll run across a friend I haven't seen in a year, and he'll be emaciated and unfocused, currently "between jobs" but heading off to a big circuit party in Montreal or Palm Springs. A few weeks later, maybe, he'll just disappear for months on end and then resurface, fresh out of rehab, only to disappear again.

Many who have survived addiction to Tina use words like "wicked" and "evil" to describe the way it can quickly consume your attention and hold you in its grip. At first blush, it sounds like crack cocaine indeed -- a rush of euphoria and confidence, a feeling of being charming and invincible. "It wipes away the blues," a friend told me, "and you forget why you were ever depressed about anything, and nothing can get you down."

Among all the party drugs -- from Ecstasy to "K" to vodka martinis -- none seems to have the ferocious power to destroy human beings like Tina. None seems to match the horror that visits many crystal meth addicts. Much of the evidence collected by health experts demonstrates that Tina is as addictive as crack cocaine, and just as lethal once addiction has grabbed hold. Worse, its effects can last from 8 to 24 hours, and can much more quickly overwhelm a person's daily life. An overdose brings seizures, heart failure, stroke and death.

Dr. Nora Volkow, a psychiatrist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, told the New York Times that she has found brain damage among frequent users that resembles an early stage of Parkinson's disease. Although kicking the habit brings some recovery of brain tissue and function, she said that many of the subjects in her study had impaired verbal and motor skills and brain tissue degradation in areas associated with feelings of euphoria. So in the pursuit of artificial confidence and joy, those with a Tina habit are physically destroying their ability to experience natural pleasure ever again.

Special Guest Star: HIV

It seems from all the first-hand reporting from addicts themselves that reckless behavior, especially unsafe sex, has become a major feature of the subculture around Tina, and endless wakefulness can mean late nights with a long string of partners. Drug-induced feelings of invincibility and euphoria seem to go hand in hand with unprotected sex these days. As if the depths of drug addiction was not enough, there is the grinding likelihood that you have contracted any number of sexually transmitted diseases -- the consequences all awaiting you once you somehow survive the titanic battle to just get sober. And financial ruin, sometimes a criminal record, a massive hole in your resume and close relationships that have been fundamentally altered by the experience.

It is no wonder that suicide becomes a serious consideration.

Hopelessness so permeates the world of Tina that public health officials describe "suicide Tuesdays" -- when long weekend party binges grind to an end for the more hardened crowd, and the plunge into despair leads to a spike in desperate behavior among more and more.

While AIDS was once the sole predator in our homes and neighborhoods, it has become a mere cohort to the Tina menace. Men with HIV find emotional relief in the drug, and lose their feelings of stigma and anxiety around the disease -- only to often trade one for another. Many begin missing anti-HIV drug treatment doses and their regimens become ineffective, while Tina suppresses natural immunity and adds further health complications. With reduced inhibitions and increasingly desperate behavior, Tina addicts who are HIV positive become virtual suicide bombers, spreading the virus to other HIV positive men and furthering the development of mutations, or infecting HIV negative men who, too, have lost any sense of fear for their lives.

So What Now?

The growing legion of the living dead among us who have become slaves of Tina represent a moral challenge we gay Americans must face. Many of them were once bright, vital Americans with much to contribute to the world, who instead ended up on a path which slowly cut them off from the world to a point where they are unlikely to find their way back.

Instead of pointing fingers at others -- at our parents, at the government, at society -- what can we ourselves do to stop this epidemic in its tracks?

First, it's time we admitted there is a problem. When it comes to an issue that helps dramatize partisan interests or drives wedges between political camps in Washington, our national political organizations will yell and scream as if it is a matter of life and death. But thousands of young gay men are being consumed in a spiraling epidemic of drug addiction while gay culture celebrates the aura of the party drug on an international scale, and no one has whispered one word about it at the highest levels of the gay establishment. That needs to change.

Secondly, we need to understand why a gay man in today's America, with everything he can do with his life, chooses the path of self-destruction that is drug addiction. Each of us can do our part to reach out to people we care about who are vulnerable to addictive behavior, who might be emotionally troubled or anxious about the future, suffering from low self-esteem or having trouble coming to terms with who they are and taking responsibility for their lives. Show compassion today -- now -- while they are still able to listen and hear you and take to heart what you have to say.

Don't just wave your finger at them -- tell them also how much you care about them. Tell them all the good sides they have, all the strengths you see in them. Be there for them now, because I can tell you from experience that there comes a point in crystal meth addiction when they can't hear you anymore, and you can't really make much of a difference in their lives, where everything rides on an almost superhuman courage and strength within them that has them crawl slowly, painfully, back into the world completely on their own and all you can do is sit back and pray for them.

We must also look within ourselves and wonder privately -- what particular road am I on in life today? Am I always looking for an easy emotional fix?

Do I give myself enough credit for being a strong person, with a lot to contribute to the world? Am I always getting incredibly drunk every time I go out, or am I doing some kind of party drug more than just once in a blue moon, and its leading to other things? Do I find myself looking for risky behavior for some reason, just as an escape?

And most of all -- am I spending enough time thinking about all the things that are right with my life, all the things I could lose if I make the wrong choices?

There's probably plenty inside you already that could produce a rush of self-confidence and even occasional euphoria -- the kind that actually lasts and builds within you over time. Yes, it's a struggle to find it and tap into it. It can be a long struggle, one with agonizing loneliness, and sometimes it has some very hard moments where you feel more down than you can imagine. But there is a dawn at the end of that night for everyone who opens his heart and believes in himself, free of the sabotaging demons that try to divert us from grace. There is a great reward for struggle on that scale -- ask any gay person a generation or two ahead of you and they'll invariably say how lucky you are, how great your life is now and will be, and how much time you're wasting on feeling sorry for yourself. It's very enlightening.

But the molten swamp, the living hell that is addiction to Tina, confounds even the strongest among us, and once she has you in her claws, it is a battle to the death -- either she goes, or you go. No compromise.

So at the fork in the road, which way are you going to go?

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