“It’s a pretty sordid tale. ”
That’s how Chad* describes his nearly decade-long dependence on a substance that plays a quiet, yet irrefutable, role in the Philadelphia gay community.
“There’s never any pretty story that involves crystal meth.”
Chad began using in the late ’90s when he was 19 and living in New York City.
In the scene in which Chad was immersed, embracing his newfound sexuality was intrinsically linked to embracing meth use.
Chad was not alone — according to several recent studies, men who have sex with men in urban areas use meth at a rate that is 10-20 times higher than the general American population.
“When I first started, that was when club drugs were really at their height and I really didn’t know how to distinguish between being gay and being a drug addict,” Chad said. “I thought they were synonymous because that’s what I was shown. Not that I looked for another image to portray.”
When he moved to Philadelphia, he found the drug to be just as plentiful and its toll on his life unforgiving.
“It just bowled me over.”
ABCs of crystal
Methamphetamine is a stimulant that causes neurotransmitters in the brain, in particular norepinephrine and dopamine, to be released and then blocks them from being taken back up into the neurons.
“It basically sends a very strong ‘on’ signal and then stops you from turning that signal off,” explained Dr. Benjamin Nordstrom, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “It gives you a ton of energy.”
Meth can be used in a variety of ways, from smoking to injecting to snorting.
Like other stimulants, the drug causes the taker to become hyper-alert and induces feelings of euphoria and can enhance sexual pleasure.
Meth can also elevate heart rate and blood pressure and, over time, can result in oral damage known as “meth mouth,” ticks often associated with obsessive compulsive disorder and can lead to behavior reflective of psychosis.
Chad said his mood chemistry was severely affected, and he, like many other meth addicts, experienced hallucinations.
“It drives people to do dangerous things,” Chad said. “They may be hearing voices telling them to harm themselves and others.”
The effect of any drug on an individual is contingent upon three factors, Nordstrom explained — the qualities of the drug, the setting in which the drug is taken and the mindset of the individual taking the drug.
For instance, Axis and Allied soldiers frequently used methamphetamines in World War II, Nordstrom said, but the impact on modern users is vastly different.
“When it’s taken in party atmospheres, it creates this social space where there’s a lot of risk-taking,” Nordstrom said. “Meth use in itself is a risk because it lowers people’s inhibitions and then when you’re in that social environment, it can lead to even more risk-taking.”
Sexual risk-taking is a common byproduct of meth use.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, male crystal-meth users who have sex with men are more than twice as likely to test positive for HIV than MSM who do not use the drug.
“We see that men who abuse crystal meth often engage in unsafe sex, many times with multiple partners,” said John Edwards, director of Mazzoni Center’s Recovery Empowerment and Community Health program. “When a person is high, he usually does not talk with his partners about safe sex. Meth many times will lead a person to make choices that they would not [make] if sober.”
Rapid downward spiral
When Chad began smoking meth, he did so casually, mostly on the weekends. Before long, however, it turned into a daily habit.
He suffered from severe dehydration and malnutrition. Already thin, Chad lost about 30 pounds.
While he was able to keep his job, his attendance and performance suffered dramatically, as did other facets of his life.
“I wasn’t taking good care of my home. My finances were a mess. I wasn’t taking care of myself,” he said. “All of those feed into that I don’t give a shit attitude, thereby making it OK to go another day without showering.”
The relationships in his life also took a turn for the worse.
“I’ve realized that even before I started using, I didn’t necessarily have the best template on how to have a healthy relationship, but meth only made it worse,” Chad said. “I was lying, hiding things and that affected every single relationship — personal, professional, romantic. Even strangers suffered, not just people I knew, because I stole, I caused property damage. There wasn’t a family member or boss I didn’t lie to. Eventually I couldn’t keep it up and people would find out, which would create mistrust and the need to hide more. It was a positive-feedback loop with negative consequences. Bad shit just brings more bad shit.”
While in New York, Chad entered rehab and underwent numerous outpatient programs, although he always found himself going back to the drug.
He moved to Philadelphia in 2006 and, while he wasn’t using as much at first, he said he easily found someone with a good connection and fell back into old habits.
His partner at the time had never used meth before but also eventually became an addict.
“I spent a lot of time working on the guilt and shame over bringing someone into it,” Chad said. “I know he was responsible for the decisions he made, but bringing that type of drug addiction into a romantic relationship just made monsters out of both of us. We didn’t like each other when we were high and we didn’t like each other when we were sober.”
Chad’s circle eventually dwindled to fellow users, as he said he gave up on keeping up the pretense.
“People who didn’t use like I did just weren’t a part of my life. There was no room for someone who didn’t understand why I couldn’t talk right or for someone who wasn’t up for days like I was.”
In the final month before he entered recovery in 2008, Chad only slept four days.
“If you can call it sleep,” he said. “It was some type of unconsciousness where I didn’t have my eyes open. There was little else I could do. I could use, try and get more drugs, crash. Maybe drink some water. That’s what my life was.”
State of meth in Philly
In the past few years, the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Narcotics Investigation and Drug Control has busted several large crystal-meth rings, netting about 100 arrests.
Bob Shiver, director of the bureau, said crystal meth accounts for about half of the agency’s investigations.
In the past two decades, meth culture has changed dramatically, Shiver said.
In the 1970s and ’80s, meth was synthesized most often through the P2P (phenyl-2-propanone) method and was commonly injected into the bloodstream, a route more potent, and more addictive, than snorting the drug.
A high is even more instantaneous when the drug can be smoked, a trend that has gained popularity in the last 20 years. While meth production and distribution used to be concentrated in the city’s river wards, with significant involvement by biker gangs, creation of the smokeable product has now largely shifted south.
“Meth used to be centered mainly in the working-class, mostly white neighborhoods like Fishtown, Port Richmond, Bridesburg. But with this crystal form of meth, it’s mostly controlled by Mexican drug cartels and mailed in,” Shiver explained. “So you can live really in any state anywhere in the country and if you have a connection to someone in a border state, or know someone who does, that’s how you get it in. It used to be that meth almost always equated entirely to a white drug, and most of the users still primarily are white, but we’re now seeing suppliers who are Hispanic or African-American because of the pipelines in place in Mexico, which may eventually change the end users, making crystal meth more accessible to those communities.”
The new meth tends to attract dealers as well as users with plenty of cash on hand: An ounce, 28.35 grams, of crystal meth typically goes for $2,000-$3,000, while a gram sells for $200-$250, compared to the $80-$100 for the old P2P version.
The Bureau of Narcotics Investigation and Drug Control works to trace the drugs from user to dealer to supplier in order to target the people at the top of the drug rings.
With the rise of mail-in method, investigators attempt to curtail shipments coming through the postal system, but that’s not the only challenge to stemming the distribution of the drug.
“There are no open-air meth corners that I’m aware of,” Shiver said. “You can pull up to 100 different places in the city and buy weed or coke; you just pull up, people ask what you want and you buy it. So when law enforcement wants to start an investigation into who controls what drug corners and the investigation centers on coke or marijuana, law enforcement could pull up and start making buys, conduct a surveillance on the corner and figure out who’s supplying the seller on the corner and work backward toward the ultimate supplier. That’s not the case with meth. It’s a more insular community, and the meth is not available in open-air markets.”
While the average Philadelphian may not be clued in to where to purchase meth, some of those with their finger on the nightlife pulse can more easily access those circles, Shiver noted.
“If you’re just looking at buying drugs on a whole as a baseline, it’s more difficult to find. But when you look specifically at who’s looking to buy it, it’s a completely different graph,” he said. “If you’re a person who frequents certain nightclubs, I don’t think it’d be hard at all to find it because meth is part of that culture.”
Next time: The intersection of gay and meth cultures and reaching for recovery.
*Names have been changed
Resources: Crystal Meth Anonymous: www.phillycma.org. Mazzoni Center’s REACH: www.mazzonicenter.org/content/reach-program; 215-563-0652 Addictions Assessment Center at Penn Presbyterian: 215-662-8747, 51 N. 39th St. Friends Hospital Intake and Recovery Center: 215-831-2600, 4641 Roosevelt Blvd.