A 2003 STUDY by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that around 10% of gay men sampled had used crystal meth at least once in the previous year compared with 0.7% of the general US population, 20% of whom admitted using at least once per week.

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who perpetrates it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really co-operating with it."
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the US, addiction and alcohol rates for gay-identified people are four to six time higher than the rest of the population, and meeting places are invariably built around drugs and alcohol. In a remarkably short time, a conspiracy of silence enabled crystal meth to become normalised and so thoroughly woven into the fabric of North America's gay social scene that a genuine fear prevailed that not using the drug, or voicing valid concerns about its potentially devastating effects, could result in ridicule, even vilification, leaving one isolated and adrift from the "action".

"For many years, crystal built this reputation as being glamorous, being fun. Anyone who's edgy is doing meth, and if you're not, you're not cool - you're not part of the 'in' crowd, not part of the scene."
~ Dan Carlson [The HIV Forum, NYC]

The code of silence that enveloped meth use across gay America, particularly in the wake of 9/11, dissuaded most from speaking out, allowing meth to flourish and resulting in an epidemic that could one day exceed AIDS' death toll - a far cry from the selflessness and compassion with which gay men rallied around each other during the height of that epidemic in the 1980-90s.

"Crystal is the crack of the gay community and needs to be discouraged on a communitywide level. When HIV/AIDS first emerged, our community rose up to care for one another and taught each other how to care for ourselves and our friends. Crystal use should be no different."
~ Jason Riggs [Stop AIDS Project]

"When we faced similar chaos at the start of the [AIDS]
epidemic we rolled up our sleeves and hunkered down to the work of taking care of our own.The disco anthem of the period, Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves, clearly resonated with gay men of that era."
~ Eric Rofes, Ph.D. [US AIDS activist, 1954-2006]

"In the old days, when we were fighting HIV, we were going out and we were doing AIDS education and we were fighting to save lives. It’s kind of the same thing - we all need to go out, spread the word, let everybody know that meth equals death, and that there is healing that can be achieved from everything.�?BR>~ Russell Beasley [Southern Voice]

But this time around, had gay men really become so callous and uncaring that they simply didn't care what was happening to those around them, even their "friends"?

"There is no such thing as recreational use of crystal meth," wrote Gary R. Cohan MD in +hivplus in 2003. "Users cannot limit their intake voluntarily. That is why we all need to speak up against partying with crystal, no matter how unpopular we think our opinion may be. Don't condone its use by apathetic indifference or casual ignorance. When you tell someone that it's uncool to do crystal you're not being a right wing, anti-
drug zealot, you're being a friend. And just as friends don't let friends drive drunk, friends don't let friends do crystal."

"Tina is the passport into a close-knit 'in-crowd' where, too often, they support each other in their delusions."
~ Mickey Weems [Ohio State Universary]

Meth has thrived, at least in part, because the ghettoised connectedness that defined America's inclusive gay social order and cultural identity up to the 1990s dispersed and fragmented amid a succession of equal rights victories which resulted in increasing acceptance and a merging with the shallow, competitive, self-absorbed, mainstream consumer culture, spawning a dumbed-down "soundbite generation" with ever-decreasing attention spans. Today, the social diseases of apathy and indifference infest a gay culture which salutes and glorifies the vacuous and the trivial while paying lip service to - and even frowns upon - meaningful values like integrity, compassion and comradeship; a fertile environment for a new virus to flourish, even one that threatens our very existence...

"Our unique, revolutionary contribution to modern life has been co-opted, homogenised and marketed as just another off-peg lifestyle, and marketing is now so powerful that even intelligent people will no longer be the bright, creative, subversive people that they once were; they'll be hollow-eyed drones so exhausted by the non-stop pursuit of sex that they'll have nothing to contribute towards social change."
~ Rupert Smith [Gay Times UK, October 2005]

Fretting about the size of our 4x4s, the number of pixels on our plasma screens or whether we are on the A-list, many of us lose sight of, and avoid rather than confront, the things that really matter as we race ahead of ourselves rather than focus on the present. And with the rise of the emotion-free void of cyberspace, no longer do many of us regard each other with reverence but as transient commodities from which to extract what we want before dumping wholesale and moving onto the next sucker.

This detachment from intrinsic values is ruthlessly exploited and promoted by gay media, particularly magazines and websites which indiscrimately compete for mainstream advertisers hungry to milk the pink pound, and invariably at the expense of readers' core values. In London, free scene magazines aimed at gay youth have long since morphed into crude, hardcore porn mags that run ads for bareback videos and page after page of explicit escort ads alongside the HIV sector's vapid, one-size-fits-all safe sex ads and zealous campaigns for the "morning after" quick-fix regimen, PEP, commodifying and devaluing sex to its basest and most reckless level, while in the US, bland, vacuous newsstand mags and community freesheets have long given free reign to Big Pharma's airbushed-to-perfection antiretroviral ads which dishonestly and irresponsibly mask the drugs' disfiguring and health-
impacting side-effects.

"Former editor, Nigel Edwards, noticed a definite shift towards consumerism in the [UK] Pink Paper's editorial policy around the...same time that gay activists claim the queer community became increasingly 'apathetic' and 'difficult to stir'. It's difficult to conclude that one had no bearing on the other."
~ Chris Morris [Positively Healthy]

Buying into a shallow demographic meant being key players in the conspiracy of silence that shrouded meth use, and US gay media has long ignored the devastation wreaked by AIDS and crystal entirely or, at best, paid scant lip service and downplayed their threat.

"It's hard to find any mention in the gay press of the devastation of AIDS. Everybody is living with it, active, surviving. Except that's not the truth. The truth is the drugs wear out. The truth is that when they do there's nothing, there's nowhere to turn. The truth for gay men In America is that when they exhaust what the medical system has to offer, it is still a terminal illness. It's an inconvenient truth, but one nonetheless."
~ Here Magazine

While magazines like Genre and Instinct have got rich off the back of ads for AIDS meds and circuit events which, for many readers, provided a gateway to meth, rather than educate their readers to its potential dangers for fear of contaminating their illusory, sanitised, Photoshopped worlds, they instead equate the gay urban lifestyle exclusively around rampant consumerism, sex, and more aesthetically-perfected eye candy than the issue before; factors which in themselves fuel low self-esteem and negative self-
perceptions among gay men, steering many in the direction of drugs like meth just as socially irresponsible American fashion magazines did to anxious, weight-conscious women in the 1960s.