What is wrong with people who take drugs?

Last night on the Rainbow Report (11.11.2005) I looked at the issue of dance parties and the associated drug culture, with the help of Tim Newton and Adam Pickvance.

Tim asked the question - what is wrong with these people who take these drugs?

I don't have a complete answer - who does - but I put in my two cents worth.

This is what I said:

In 1967 I was 17 yrs old, still in school, fairly certain I was gay and desperate not to be. I didn’t know anyone else who was. Everything I could find on the subject was relentlessly negative, full of words like ‘sick’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘unnatural’. When the issue made the papers, it was stories of blackmail and murders.

And there was a lot about homosexuality in the papers in 1967, because that was the year the law finally changed in Britain. Well, I thought, at least I won’t face the prospect of going to jail if I do give in to my ‘unnatural’ urges and have sex with another man.

Things have changed a bit since then – but not as much as we’d like to think. There are still plenty of people who like to label us abnormal and unnatural and sick. Now there are a lot more people and organizations to prove the opposite. There are books, television programs, even a radio station, if you’re lucky enough to live in Melbourne. But too many kids are still brought up to think there’s something wrong with them, that their natural desires are bad, sinful, sick – take your pick.

So after you’ve discounted the usual reasons you drink too much and experiment with drugs when you’re young - such as, you want to find out what it’s like, and you don’t want to take someone else’s word for it – lots of us gay men do it because it seems to make it easier to do what you really want to do, which is to make a physical, sexual and emotional connection with someone else.

I say seems, because I’ve been there and done that. When I got to uni in 1968 I spent a lot of time trying not to be gay, not to give in to my ‘unnatural’ desires, and when I couldn’t do that any more, I got drunk and got laid. Or I got stoned and laid. Or dropped acid and got laid. Friends said to me, look, all you’re doing is self-medicating, and making things worse: what you really need is to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist fed me valium, and then I didn’t feel like getting laid at all. Not much of a solution, eh? And still gay.

A study this year of gay men coming off crystal meth in New York discovered that most of them had been doing just what I used to do: using drugs to overcome their own self-doubt, fear and hate. They couldn’t reach out and make that connection they desperately wanted without some chemical help, because they’d all been taught, throughout their childhoods, that being gay was bad. Seems like nothing much has changed for many people, in thirty years.

I was lucky, I pulled myself together and got out of all that. But before I started losing friends to AIDS, I’d already lost many to the bottle, barbiturates, the despairing razor blade across the wrists or the rope thrown over a tree branch. What saved me was getting involved in fighting for gay rights with the Gay Liberation Front, helping to start Britains first gay newspaper, Gay News.

Instead of blaming myself for the way I felt about being gay, I now put the blame where it properly belongs, on all the bigots and fools who want me to think I’m somehow less than human, undeserving of equality and respect, because I’m gay. Today of all days it seems appropriate to say, maintain the rage.

The battle against party drugs and drug-fuelled nights on the town, for many gay men, won’t be won by society coming down ever more heavily on the drug users themselves. It’ll be over when gays and lesbians are fully accepted – not tolerated but accepted – members of society. Till then there will always be those who think they need drugs to help them feel good about themselves – our job is to understand and help them through, keep them alive, not condemn them.