Slamming Adverts and Slam Packs: The Burrell Street Clinic

What was the thinking behind the current ‘Slam Safely’ campaign?

It comes off the back of a number of things, and the first thing is the number of injectors that we started to see at Burrell Street. We were really surprised, because it kind of came out of nowhere. I think it’s been a very interesting history in the change of the types of drugs that gay people are using, and I recognise that part of that is due to the closure of routes of certain types of drugs being able to get into the country.

But also there has to be something going on around the sex that people are having, and the headspace in which they are in, in order to choose the drugs that they are using. We didn’t expect to see such a rise in crystal meth use. We’re more surprised by the injecting of mephedrone. And what we seem to be seeing, and this is only anecdotal evidence for us, is that it’s an older age group that are injecting crystal, and it’s a much younger age group injecting mephedrone, which is why we’ve been targeting Grindr and yourselves in particular.

Do you think the younger age group inject mephedrone because they see it as more harmless, even though it’s still injecting? 

Yes. And because it’s very, very cheap as well, and they’re probably used to snorting it, or mixing it up in water and drinking it, and so will then probably get introduced to the idea of injecting it by a sex partner or at a sex party and will give it a go. The problem I have with mephedrone is it’s a nasty drug.

In what way?

The evidence and research we have around this drug and what it might do to people in the short and long-term is very, very small. This is not ecstasy where we’ve got a huge amount of data done over the years as to what kind of effect this drug will have. It came out and hit a market at a very specific time to do a very specific thing. It’s very, very clever. But it has unpleasant side effects; the anxiety and the comedowns people get from it. They’re also injecting something that they’re buying from a dealer and they don’t know what is in that power or what they have put in their bodies, and that concerns me as well.

“How many years have the government been doing ‘stop taking drugs’ or ‘saying no’? It doesn’t work.”

Do you think the adverts, with the huge words stating ‘SLAM SAFELY’, might seem to condone slamming? 

I don’t think so. I think we’re very clear actually about what we’re trying to say, which is: ‘if you must inject, then please do it safely.’ And I think we’re very clear about the wording that we use and being very, very careful on that as well. It’s not something that we want people to do and we’re not trying to advertise this as a service where it’s okay. We’re really concerned about the health of people. But this is a harm minimisation approach, and if I said to you ‘stop using’, that won’t do anything – it’s a typical psychological response, if I tell you to not do something, you’ll want to do it more, so actually that’s not the right route to go down.

How many years have the government been doing ‘stop taking drugs’ or ‘saying no’? It doesn’t work. So what we do is have the ability to build up relationships with people who are using, and we know that gay men prefer to come to sexual health clinics and have a check-up and pick up things like needles rather than they would going to a community drugs team. They feel more comfortable here.

You don’t think there’s a chance of this wording, or the vernacular used, normalising the idea of slamming in a way? 

I think that’s a really, really good question. But what we’re trying to do is make it, I suppose, words that people know. It’s like when we talk in the clinic: we start talking about people having sexual intercourse, they often don’t know what we mean. If we talk about fucking, people know exactly what we mean. And I think it’s the same with the vocabulary we use around slamming, people know what slamming is – if we’re talking about injecting, it becomes much more difficult language to start describing, so that’s why we’ve gone for this kind of wording.

“If you have a sex party where there’s a large number of people, there may be people who are HIV positive, HIV negative, Hepatitis C positive, Hepatitis B positive. It becomes a perfect storm of sexually transmitted infections.”

So, if people are doing it, at least they’ve got the message?

Absolutely, which is ‘look after yourself’. And that’s what we want to put forward: if you’re going to do this, if you have to do this, for fuck’s sake, look after yourself in doing it. And what we do is provide [in our free ‘Slam Packs’] syringes that are colour-coded, so if you’re at a party, you are not going to mistake your syringe for somebody else’s syringe. Because this is the perfect storm, if you have a sex party where there’s a large number of people, there may be people who are HIV positive, HIV negative, Hepatitis C positive, Hepatitis B positive. It becomes a perfect storm of sexually transmitted infections, injecting drugs and viruses and bacteria. And so what we want to do is try and limit the possibility of infections spreading.