By Karen Ocamb

“There is a devil in our community,” filmmaker Todd Ahlberg told a packed auditorium at the Director’s Guild before the July 8 screening of his documentary, Meth, at Outfest. He warned that some of the scenes of users shooting up or talking about using or the sexual psychedelic silhouettes may be “triggers” for those recovering from crystal methamphetamine. “Please do what’s best for you,” he said, noting that he would not be offended if people walked out to seek help from counselors standing by.

“We need to wipe crystal meth off our agenda and help ourselves get back to living,” Ahlberg said. “Enjoy Meth”—he meant the film, of course, but the ironic choice of words prompted gales of laughter, breaking the tension in the cavernous theater. Everyone expected to see their own lives or the lives of someone they love flash before their eyes.

The film quickly gets to the crux of crystal’s enticement as one former user talks about meth as the promise of “sex as it’s supposed to be and being the person I knew I always wanted to be” while believing “I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

But then, says James, who used to have a six-figure salary before he lost everything to meth, “there’s never enough.” Everything has to be “bigger, faster, better... I was a slave to it. When I wasn’t working, I was having sex and no one knew.”

For former Los Angeles actor/AIDS educator Mark King, the drug made him feel like “I’m it,” somebody important.

Stephan, who wound up homeless in Palm Springs, says he kept “sinking lower and lower to get those drugs,” though he never considered himself “a sexual madman.”

Sex, most agree, became a full time job, until it became “strange, evil sex.” HIV was not an issue. “What do I care? Somewhere I knew I was killing myself,” says Stephan. “There’s something about crystal that re-wires you and makes you want to go to a really dark place,” says another. “You’re twisted, sick, seduced, and led to the edge of a cliff and somebody standing behind you says, ‘jump.’”

“Safer sex would be most appropriate but it doesn’t really cross my mind,” says Jonathan, 21, whose humor counters the jaw-dropping numbness and flippancy with which the users describe their harrowing lives on meth.

Perhaps one of the most stunning stories comes from Andrew, who describes himself as an entrepreneur and a drug dealer who shoots up on camera. He epitomizes the power of denial as his world caves in. “I don’t understand why all these things happen to me,” he says. “Very little of it has to do with dope. It’s just that I keep getting shit on.” His mother Judy, who pays his rent, sits next to him, saying he has been clean since he got out of jail and rehab. Later Andrew says he feels guilty about having lied to her. “I’m done,” he says. He’s not.

But others are. We watch Jared throw his works over a fence—not quite sure if he’ll scurry after them once the camera’s off. Jonathan talks about his addiction getting “really bad” before he got into recovery. Brent from Houston says he still has sex—“but it’s special today.”

Mark talks about how “base” his life became—the “nuts, the paranoid, disillusioned” meth addicts he spent time with “shooting up in the bathroom,” craving indiscriminate sex. “That’s pathetic.”

Mark joined Ahlberg on a panel following the screening, urging the audience to be “scared at what’s happening in this community.” There is, Mark said, “a culture of irresponsibility” in the gay community where meth use has been rationalized away as “boys will be boys.” But “this is not our legacy—tweaked up drug addicts. Is this the best we can do?”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 15-17 percent of all gay men used meth in the three months prior to August 2005 and up to 20 percent have used in the last year.

Dr. Cathy Reback, director of prevention at the Van Ness Recovery House and principal investigator at Friends Research Institute, is in the forefront of meth research, especially its link to HIV. What’s new about methamphetamine, she told IN, is that “this drug has been introduced into the gay community at the same time HIV is running havoc through the population,” which makes it a public health crisis.

Reback and her colleague Dr. Steven Shoptaw at the Department of Family Medicine at UCLA have observed an association between the level of meth use and HIV sero-conversion. Field workers approached gay men at bars, sex clubs or on the street and asked if they used meth at least once in the previous 30 days and approximately 23 percent said they were HIV-infected. In another project, among gay men who reported using methamphetamine at least once a month for six months, 42 percent were HIV infected. When those seeking treatment at three meth outpatient clinics were asked about their HIV status, 60 percent reported they were HIV-positive. Of those who sought residential care, 86 percent reported they were HIV-infected.

“What that means,” Reback said, “is that the longer one uses, the more they engage in high-risk sexual activity and the more likely they are to be HIV-infected.” And, contrary to the belief that meth addicts don’t care about their HIV status, Reback said, “They care very much.”

Also contrary to popular belief that it is almost impossible to escape from the “devil” of meth, Reback and others say there is hope. And as recovery reveals the “authentic self,” meth sex is replaced by “something else. You are going to start to care of about the partner you’re having sex with. That’s one of the consequences of getting clean.”

For information about finding treatment, contact Friends La Brea at (323) 463-7001.

In the next issue, IN will look at Prometa, a new treatment protocol for meth. Dr. Matthew Torrington tells IN that 100 of his patients on the new treatment no longer crave crystal meth.