By Patrick Cash
Rarely is it a surprise to learn that drugs are widely used on the gay scene. People who party at the weekends for forty-eight hours straight aren’t staying up on Red Bull alone. But what exactly are the long-term physical effects of the drugs upon a body?
GHB is probably the drug people know most about the dangers of. Take a little of it and it produces an enjoyable high ranging from the mellow to the intense depending on how many millilitres you’re ingesting; take too much of it and users can ‘go under’, where they lose adequate physical control and their eyes roll into the backs of their heads.
In a club these cases are generally swiftly whisked out of sight by efficient medics, but you still know they’ve happened.
In the short term then this explains why G is often used as a date rape drug, heightened by the often severe reactions when mixed with alcohol. But what are the risks over time and consistent use?
The fact that it’s an acid and legitimately bought and used by many car owners as an alloy cleaner on the BMW or Ford Capri doesn’t suggest it’s going to be ideal for your body in the first place.
Upon one internet forum a user who took G from the ages of sixteen to twenty-three talks about his struggles giving it up and the side effects he suffered from it: ‘So I quit. And all was downhill from there. I slowly stopped going out. Depression. Anxiety. No good feelings in my life. No will to do anything. Brain works like shit. Horrible memory.
‘Can’t remember what I did two nights ago without thinking about it hard. Short-term memory is crap. Conversational skills have gone to zero. Wittiness and comedy have left me. Sex drive and sociability have left. No confidence what so ever. No will to live. A general foggy and unmotivated brain.’
This testimony is supported by some scientific studies: in tests on rats G has been found to impair spatial and working learning and memory. Repeated administration could drastically reduce the number of neurons and non-neuronal cells in the pre-frontal lobe.
Of course it’s not just G that can have harmful effects on the brain and body. Cocaine, despite providing intense stimulation for thirty minutes or so after a line, has allegedly been proven to decrease the activity of the brain over long-term usage, by affecting the manner in which neurons metabolize glucose.
Although the study which proves this compares two brains: a cocaine-user’s and a non-cocaine-user’s, and the glaring moot point that seems to suggest itself here is that the cocaine-user’s brain may just be naturally less active than the non-user’s.
In the interests of fair representation research funded by the NIDA and the Albert Einstein Medical Centre in Philadelphia were ‘unable to detect any difference in performance, verbal or full scale IQ scores between cocaine-exposed children [children born cocaine dependent to cocaine addict patients] and control children at age 4 years.’
Yet, whether you can escape long-term brain damage with coke or not, if you’re taking it with alcohol the two drugs combine in your system to produce a psychoactive (mind altering) substance named cocaethylene which is supposed to be far more damaging on your liver than either of its component drugs ingested separately.
Cocaine, as a particularly potent stimulant, can also adjust the workings of the heart, occasionally to fatal extremes if taken in overdosing quantity. Oh yeah, and remember Daniella Westbrook?
MDMA (ecstasy) certainly affects the mind – the way they work is to stimulate receptors in the brain to release vast overloads of ‘happy hormones’ like serotonin and dopamine to rush through your system, causing a feeling of pleasure and euphoria.
Of course the feelings get less the more you take it (ever heard the phrase ‘nothing’s like your first pill’?) and prolongued use in large quantities can induce feelings of depression and mid-week lows, suicide Tuesday comes a-knocking.
Over years of use the depression can set in more permanently as the serotonin receptors may become mutated; however some studies purport there may be some neuroprotective strategies available including the ingestion of antioxidants.
Although this article is specifically about long-term effects it is worth mentioning that MDMA can be one of the most dangerous drugs for short-term effects in a club: one of the more notorious being that it interferes with the antidiuretic (meaning you can’t piss) hormone vasopressin.
Most of the mid-twenties generation will have been shown a video in school talking about Leah Betts, who died in the mid-90s from taking a pill in a club, drinking too much water, not being able to urinate and the water eventually ‘flooding’ her brain.
However, the other risk of the drug is that it can affect the body’s ability to regulate core body temperature, which, in a club environment, where everyone is hot and sweaty, can potentially induce hyperthermia where the internal temperature of the body reaches 42ºC and the vital organs switch themselves off.
Regulating dose, consistently changing environment from the dance floor to the chill-out area and forcing yourself to piss, however much you don’t feel like it, can all negate these hazards.
Weed is often in the newspapers as inducing various forms of psychosis, although the link between cannabis and psychosis is established, it is still unclear as to whether the cannibis itself triggered the disorder.
Ketamine is officially used as a horse tranquiliser and is an increasingly widely-used drug on the clubbing scene. A recent report by Celia J. A. Morgan and H. Valerie Curran has found that ketamine may be more addictive than previously thought, with its
rapid ‘high’ thought to increase its abuse potential.
It also says that frequent ketamine users report escalating doses over time, with one study finding a 600% increase from first use to current use. In the short-term K can be a dizzy high and induce enjoyable hallucinogenic effects, take too much and you go into a K Hole which can be a disturbing experience.
Some users begin to believe in the superior reality of K-land more than the real world; seeking for nirvana in their own form of chemical-induced meditation. The Hong Kong Medical Journal reported that, after following K-users over four years, bladder and kidney damage was apparent, and there was also a particular susceptibility to urinary tract infections. Drinking cranberry juice may alleviate some of these dangers.
Pills may contain any other chemicals in their make-up apart from MDMA including the poison arsenic; drugs that come in baggies or wraps as a powder are sometimes ground up with very fine broken glass by particularly unscrupulous dealers so as to make up the weight of the gram whilst putting less of the actual chemical in.
If a line’s particularly burning, and there’s a large amount of blood in your nostril, chances are you want to get rid of that stuff.
But then all of this is hardly ‘stop the press’ news: most drug users understand that they ain’t exactly giving their bodies the Atkins diet when they hit the clubs on the weekend or ring Alessandro over in Shoreditch for a mid-week pick me up.
There is a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking instinct to human nature that seems particularly prevalent in certain groups of gay men, arguably less constrained than their straight counterparts by party downers like wives and small children.
And Kingsley Amis summed it up, ‘there is no pleasure worth foregoing for the sake of five long years in a nursing home in Weston-Super-Mare’.
Yet it’s also important to find a balance. There is almost an element of poignancy to see people work drone-like all week for the sake of staying up all weekend at, essentially, the same parties with the same people.
If you’re regularly taking large quantities of drugs over a long period of years then it’s possible you’ll suffer some side effects, especially when you hit middle-age.
Try and get as much sleep as possible when not out partying; introduce a lot of fresh fruit (bananas for the potassium), nuts (containing selenium for the immune system), fish (good for the brain) and vegetables into your diet; exercise regularly with cardio-vascular activities – not just weight-lifting – to get the heart healthy.
All simple and obvious tips, perhaps, but where there might be a smouldering demon lurking it doesn’t mean you can’t polish up the other side of the coin too.
