[see post on this talk on 7/2/07]
The most powerful antidote to persistent meth use in the gay community, according to educator Susan Kingston, is “gay men talking to other gay men.”
Kingston, a drug use and HIV prevention health educator for the Seattle & King County Department of Public Health, spoke June 27 on “Crystal Meth: What the DEA and Gay Media Won’t Tell You” at the Center on Halsted.
Kingston addressed persistent myths surrounding meth and the people who use it. While she did not discount the severity of meth use in the gay community, she did take issue with how the drug has been portrayed both by health and law officials and the media.
“There is no empirical evidence that anything is more addictive than anything else,” Kingston said, addressing the perception that meth has more volatile addictive components than other drugs.
“The most addictive drug is the one that you (yourself) are addicted to,” she added.
Kingston said that, while systematically recounting meth’s addictive qualities in the media might discourage a few people from trying the drug, they mostly serve to encourage people to turn to other harmful substances.
“The people who benefit most from that myth are cocaine dealers,” she said.
Another common misconception is that meth is the most pervasive and dangerous drug in the gay community right now.
Kingston said alcohol is the most commonly abused drug in the gay community, as it is in the straight one, so describing meth in catastrophic terms is inaccurate and counterproductive.
Ten percent of gay men have used meth, Kingston said, adding that about half of those men are regular users and half of those regular users have problems functioning because of their drug use.
“This means 90 percent of gay men are not using this drug,” Kingston said. “If you survived that whole whistle-blowing on the dance-floor craze, you can survive this.”
Kingston said that talk about meth often contributes to a rhetoric that pathologizes gay mens’ health. When a health crisis hits, she said, health officials often panic and begin dissecting the intricacies of the gay community’s sex practices.
“Why can’t the default position be a place of wellness?” Kingston asked.
She derided ad campaigns that attempted to scare viewers away from meth. Such ads usually fail to scare anyone but the people least likely to become addicted.
“The more you promote risks, the more attractive (the behavior) is to risky people,” Kingston said. The ads also stigmatize addicts unnecessarily.
“It is impossible to characterize the drug as evil without characterizing drug users as evil,” she said. “We have to have sympathy for people who use. None of us think we will stumble.”
The “elephant in the room” that nobody wants to talk about, according to Kingston, is that people use the drug because it feels good.
“We have to end our tacit silence about pleasure,” she said.
The next step in addressing the gay community’s use of meth should be finding out what is hindering some men from finding pleasure without the drug, Kingston said, adding that, underneath much of the drug use is a yearning for connection and desire to escape a sense of isolation.
Kingston’s talk was sponsored by the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and the Center on Halsted.
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