Crystal City

Crystal meth, obviously, it comes in little rock forms.

You know what you're getting.

Majority of the time

it will be my younger appearance and willingness

to do whatever they want that will provide me the drugs.

So what I do is I take this and then in the baggy.

Good.

Oh, I've had periods of sobriety, you know,

within my five years of using I've had eight months,

I've had six months, I've had a little three months,

two months, you know, a few weeks, month.

I don't use every single day, sleep, and then keep using.

I know that if I do that that I'll be dead in six months.

At some point I have to be realistic, you know.

For me this is suitable enough.

In 2008, when I started using crystal meth,

I was in a bar called Detox down in the East Village

and I had the most extraordinary head rush that I had ever had in my entire life.

Like, I felt like I was gonna die on the spot, it was so intense.

Oh, wow, it was like-- it was like--

it was like dying and going to heaven.

Freedom. Meth-- meth, it's freedom.

Like no other drug took me to that type of oblivion

like where I just didn't give a fuck.

It's an exit door. I wish I had an exit door out of my life.

It made everybody seem weirdly equal

and it also made me feel like no matter who I am or what my experience was,

now I'm kind of like in this.

I just knew like there was this incredible sensation, like I need more of this drug.

Methamphetamine really impacts every sociological class,

every kind of person across the board.

We're seeing meth use among gay men in New York City

rise three and four hundred percent.

Over the last twenty years we've seen meth only get stronger.

It's becoming more pure. We're getting newer synthetics on the horizon

and it's something that's increasing in our society as a whole.

So I think this is a tidal wave that we just can't close our eyes and ignore.

There's a sense that if we come out publicly about this epidemic,

it will remind everyone that we're deviants.

This epidemic needs to be addressed more clearly.

Dishwashing is always with it,

but when you have a dishwasher, it saves your time and energy

and washes your dishes hygienically clean every time.

All the unpleasantness of the chore is done away with.

You know, what's important to understand is that meth

is only the latest iteration of amphetamines.

My mother's generation were actually being prescribed amphetamines.

Mother's Little Helper, you know what Mother's Little Helper is?

It's meth. It's Dexedrine and Benzedrine.

Oh my God, this house is so clean!

In World War II, it was used by all sides.

Think about the kamikaze pilots who were using methamphetamine

and think about the recklessness, the impulsivity.

Studies have shown that a lot of the friendly fire accidents

are actually caused by people being up too long on stimulants.

But it really was the first of these synthetics.

There's a trend now on almost every drug class to have synthetics.

So we're seeing, for example, heroin being gradually replaced by fentanyl,

which is synthetic.

No one had any idea the destructive potential of the drug,

and it's very hard to control or regulate.

In the late '90s,

dealers out west had been trying to break into the East Coast market

because of the fundraising scene,

the party scene that was going on at the time.

They realized it was through the gay community.

That was the way to break into the East Coast.

It was something that they began marketing

as a way of staying up longer on the dance floor.

I met a guy named Mado Neivelli

and he was young and Italian and gorgeous.

And I was no slouch, I was the cute guy

but I didn't have that high of an opinion of myself.

But this guy wanted to hang out with me, and I was like, hell, yeah.

I remember him saying "Do you smoke?"

And I'm like, "Well, no, I don't."

And I thought he was talking about cigarettes.

And he's like, "Well, have you ever tried 'Tina'?"

And I really wasn't sure what he meant by that.

And he holds up this pipe and he said, "Take a puff of this."

And he told me how to do it.

I'm thinking, "Well, if this is what I got to do to play with this guy,

then I'm gonna do it," and I did and I remember the rush of it.

I'm feeling that rush right now.

So my name's Kristian Becker.

I was born and raised in New York in the Bronx.

I live life how I wanna live life.

I have been a crystal meth user since I was nineteen.

You know, when I did it the first time,

I was in Miami and I was on Grindr

and I was talking to this dude, six-foot-two,

beautiful, light-skinned Cuban guy.

During the messages he asked, "Do you parTy?"

It's like a capital T, and I was like,

I didn't pay no mind to it 'cause I had never heard the term before.

And I was like, "Yeah, of course, I've been partying all night."

He sends me his address, so I take a cab there

and then when I come in, I see a mountain of stuff on his kitchen counter.

Turns out he's a dealer, but it's like a mountain, mountain of it.

And he hands me the pipe.

Every once in a while you get that response of,

"Oh, you don't look like a crystal meth addict."

Because crystal meth still does have that stigma;

one, of it being just some trailer-trash drug that's made in a lab in the Midwest.

But I feel like now people are really starting to see what it's about

and how it's used in metropolitan areas and, specifically, among gay men.

The skinniness, the ability to have sex,

you know, the hyper focusness, it's a perfect storm for gay people.

So chemsex is this whole idea of using drugs

as a way to enhance the sexual experience.

So meth is a really effective way to numb, as I mentioned.

I think that a lot of that is a result

of what in the literature is called "minority stress",

where people who have experienced a lot of discrimination and stigma

based on who they are experience a lot of mental health and addiction issues.

I've had a lot of clients who have never been comfortable with gay sex

who felt for the first time using methamphetamine

they can celebrate being gay and having gay sex

in a way that they never experienced before.

There are some estimates that one out of four gay men

in major urban areas in the States

are semi-regularly using methamphetamine.

It's at epidemic levels within the gay community.

I knew when I was probably seven or eight years old that I was--

there was something different about me.

I knew that I liked

men.

I also knew that it was not what I was supposed to like,

because boys were supposed to go with girls, men married women.

I remember being attracted to my best friend who lived across the street.

And, but always keeping it quiet.

Everyone else knew I was gay before I did,

or like before I was able to say it out loud.

It was funny to make fun of gay people.

I remember growing up and I would say like "That's so gay," you know.

That was just like a thing people said.

And then I came to NYU and it's like the gayest school in the world, so.

Many gay men find it difficult to create connections. Why?

Because when you come to New York or any city or anywhere really

you're told that you have one of two things to offer.

You're either gonna go on an app and have sex

or you're gonna go to a bar and get drunk.

So I think we have the apps like Grindr and Scruff

that have made it tremendously easy

to facilitate the sort of party and play culture.

And I think that's really had an impact on fueling the use of chemsex.

I was what they would call a weekend warrior.

Monday through Friday I would behave,

and then Friday night I would log on the apps and the websites.

I probably had about six or seven different profiles or accounts.

And just start what they called out the hunt,

which is look for the hottest guy with free drugs

and pretty much pursue that.

So some of the identifying factors

on the apps include a lot of shorthand,

like "PnP," standing for "party and play."

If I am searching for drugs,

then I'll look for parTy with a capital T, PnP, cloud emoji,

a little Japanese party popper emoji.

These phrases that to the initiated

are recognizable in terms of what they mean.

They're willing to both hook up for sex and to use drugs as well.

The thing with crystal meth and me is I never had to buy "Tina".

In the party community, you know,

there's very few young people, you know, who party.

Um, and gays, you know, they're always chasing the young ones.

So you'd show up, throw stuff at you to get you as, you know,

as high as you wanted, um, hotel rooms.

Especially in big cities, I think meth is a great equalizer.

So you have a lot of older guys with money

and younger guys who can provide sex.

And a lot of it was power because usually I didn't have the funds to do it.

I mean I needed something from them,

they needed something, you know, from me and we get that.

We know how that works.

Being wanted and like getting high and,

like, that-- that doesn't seem bad.

So I'm gonna get paid to do that, too?

Great. I needed to pay my rent.

At that point in my life, why would I say no to that, you know?

So the first time I tried crystal, and it was like holy shit.

All the issues were gone. Like me having no money was gone.

Me not making it musically where I thought I should have been was gone.

All the ex-boyfriends in my head were gone.

Like, all of the issues, I just got to completely turn off the world.

My name is Jimmie and I'm twenty-six years old, turning twenty-seven.

I think maybe for the longest time I was known as like the shy, quiet kid,

and took me a while to come into my own.

I have these impressions of myself

as like this innocent guy

who got corrupted by these greedy men

who just wanted what they wanted. But I really did want it, too.

You know I can be three sheets to the wind tomorrow,

even tonight, who even knows.

Once you're doing crystal meth, it takes all of those extreme things about you,

even those assets, and it amplifies it.

There's not a lot of, you know, things that I'm insecure about,

physically and-- and emotionally,

but it didn't really too much matter in that moment when--

at least when the high was going on.