“Somebody overdoses, so they call for an ambulance, but the police turn up first,” Patriic Gayle says from across the table at the London HQ of the Gay Men’s Health Collective (GMHC), where he is Project Lead. We’re right next to stacks of condoms, lube, gloves, salt tablets and needles, neatly contained in cardboard packs. These boxes also come stuffed with educational pamphlets about everything from safe fisting to “your rights on arrest”. Gayle explains: “I've lost count of the number of times that gay men say, ‘Well, we know we should call for an ambulance. We don't want anybody else to die. But we are afraid.’ And so they don’t. And I know of stories where guys have been put into Ubers and dropped off at A&E.”
It’s been 10 years since the term “chemsex” was first published in a paper titled “Sexualised drug use by MSM (men who have sex with men”) and written by activist David Stuart. Since then, the “gay” scene and the chemsex scene have undergone changes. Salacious and borderline homophobic descriptions of chemsex played out in tabloid coverage of the 2016 trial of Stephen Port, who murdered four young men, likely with G/GHB/GBL, before finally being caught. In 2020, the same drug was reclassified to Class B - meaning higher sentences for possession and dealing – after rapist Reynhard Sinaga using it to facilitate his attacks on at least 48 men.
analysis of government figures suggests that up to 1,000 people have died from possible chemsex-related harms in the last decade, too. So what else is new for chemsex right now? What’s getting better? What still needs work? And as ever, how
