Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger’s Newsmagazine | 28.05.2005 19:31

Psychotherapist Neva Chauppette, Psy.D., spoke to an audience of about 150 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center Monday evening, May 23 about the dangers of methamphetamine use and its potential threat to the Queer community, Gay men in particular. Though the title of her presentation was “Methamphetamine Use: Reasons, Risks and Practical Interventions,” a good part of her talk also condemned the sexual culture of Gay men — particularly the heavy emphasis on casual sexual contacts made in bars, at circuit parties, on Gay cruises or via the Internet — and accused Gay male meth users of jeopardizing the respectability Lesbians in particular have worked to win for the Queer community.

Neva Chauppette, Psy.D.

Psychotherapist Delivers Impassioned Presentation on Queers and Crystal

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

Psychotherapist Neva Chauppette, Psy.D., spoke to an audience of about 150 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center Monday evening, May 23 about the dangers of methamphetamine use and its potential threat to the Queer community, Gay men in particular. Though the title of her presentation was “Methamphetamine Use: Reasons, Risks and Practical Interventions,” a good part of her talk also condemned the sexual culture of Gay men — particularly the heavy emphasis on casual sexual contacts made in bars, at circuit parties, on Gay cruises or via the Internet — and accused Gay male meth users of jeopardizing the respectability Lesbians in particular have worked to win for the Queer community.

“I’m not trying to restrict people’s lives,” Dr. Chauppette said at the end of her presentation. “I’m just asking us to take a look at are we making good choices, not just for ourselves individually but for our community as a whole. When I get up here in front of you, I’m not just representing the psychologists and drug and alcohol treatment people, I’m representing Lesbians who worked very hard to get to the place where I can even have a voice to speak to you. I don’t want us to — we fought so long to get our sexual expression validated, to now have a drug come into our community and take that behavior that we fought so hard to get validated, and turn it against us. We must do something about that, in my opinion, and I hope you feel the same.”

Dr. Chauppette began her presentation in a similar vein, attacking the Queer community’s reliance on bars as social and sexual meeting places. “We must look at what we’re doing in this community and start allowing places like this [the Center] to become the center of our community, not bars, clubs and circuit scenes.” She said that one of the main reasons people use methamphetamine is “the sexual abandonment associated with this drug, which is co-signed by the cruise ships and circuit scenes. We have to ask why we’ve let this drug take away what we’ve worked for: acceptance as a community.” She also blamed the Queer community’s increasing rates of methamphetamine use and so-called “sexual addiction” in part on “the emergence of the Internet as a meeting place for sex and porn.”

When she wasn’t attacking the community and social mores of Gay men and attributing meth use in the Queer community to them, Dr. Chauppette explained the difference between the two types of the drug as well as focusing on the dangers they have in common. The more common form, known colloquially as “crystal,” “ice,” or “tina,” is a crystallized form of the drug that lasts longer, is more dangerous and is usually taken via smoking. Powder methamphetamine, which is chemically similar and works the same way, is known as “crank” or “speed” and is usually inhaled or injected. Most Gay men she’s worked with as a drug treatment counselor won’t take the powder form of the drug and insist on using crystal instead.

Dr. Chauppette admitted that the public interest in crystal use in the Queer community is focused mostly on the so-called “supervirus” — an especially dangerous variant of HIV supposedly found in a New York Gay man who was a heavy crystal user and reported hundreds of different sexual partners — Dr. Chauppette focused mostly on the intrinsic dangers of the drug itself. She also discussed the increasing practice of many Gay men who mix crystal with Viagra, Cialis or other drugs that stimulate erections. They do that because crystal, while stimulating the desire for sex, interferes with a man’s ability to get or maintain an erection — and this, she said, creates “three factors all dancing around with each other” in the user’s body (crystal, Viagra and so-called “sex addiction”).

“People are attracted to this drug for many reasons,” Dr. Chauppette said. Her slides described the desired effects at low doses as “increased alertness, wakefulness, elevation of mood, mild euphoria, increase in athletic performance [which is why, she said, she frequently sees it being used in gyms], decrease in fatigue, [and] increased energy.” In her commentary, she added that the increased energy and decreased fatigue make crystal particularly appealing to people with AIDS or HIV, especially those taking antiviral drugs.

Even at low doses, Dr. Chauppette explained, meth can create “increased instability, restlessness, insomnia, anxiety [or] panic.” At higher doses — and she said just about everybody who uses this drug quickly develops an addiction tolerance and steps up their doses — meth “can induce a pattern of psychosis marked by confused, disorganized behaviors, irritability, fear, paranoia, hallucinations, increased aggressiveness and antisocial behaviors.” In addition to the mental effects, she added, the drug’s physical dangers include “increased pulse, blood pressure, respiration, and temperature.” She warned that meth “can cause a stroke, heart attack or kidney failure.”

In her live comments, Dr. Chauppette was a lot more blunt than in the relatively restrained language on her slides. “Heroin addiction will put you in a police car, but crystal will cause a lot more insanity,” she said. “This drug will set you up for domestic violence, child abuse and neglect. … Ice [crystal] is more potent than powder so you’ll get to the insanity sooner. If the metabolism rate is reduced, the drug will sit in the body longer than usual and [you will] reach the psychotic state sooner.” She also explained why the drug decreases sexual performance even though it increases sexual desire: “The blood flow to the penis is constricted because it’s a vaso-constrictor.” This, she said, is the source of meth-related heart attacks and strokes — and also why men in particular will want to mix it with vaso-dilators like Viagra and Cialis.

Dr. Chauppette also explained one of the other major effects of crystal: the odd picking at their own skin heavy users frequently do. “You’ll see people with ‘speed bumps,’ people who pick at little bumps on their skin or experience tactile hallucinations and create bumps or sores that look like chickenpox,” she said. “It dilates the pupils and creates dopamine production similar to schizophrenia. That’s why I encourage people to recognize that, if they try to intervene with lovers or family members who are on the drug, they can be the target of violence or aggression because they’re literally ‘not the same person’ chemically.”

One of Dr. Chauppette’s more grim scenarios about meth abuse was of people in whom two of the drug’s major effects — compulsive masturbation and paranoia — leads them to “check themselves into motel rooms with pipes and porn tapes,” continually jack off with one hand and frantically peek through the drawn shades or blinds with the other hand, looking for people they’re convinced are following or spying on them because the drug has made them paranoid. “Most of my clients get to a point where the libido will not fade even though orgasm is physically impossible,” she said.

Inevitably, Dr. Chauppette also discussed the alleged connections between Queer men’s increasing crystal use and the supposedly growing rate of new HIV infections — and she embraced the controversial concept of “sex addiction” as if it were proven scientific fact. “There are a lot of features associated with this drug that are factors in moving the HIV epidemic [sic] from 40,000 to 45,000 new cases per year,” she said. “When we mix meth, sex addiction and Viagra you have three factors dancing around with each other.” Indeed, towards the end of her presentation she started to talk about “sex addiction” as well and said that because she regards it as a common co-factor with meth addiction, especially among Gay men, she usually insists that Gay men in recovery from meth use Lesbians as their 12-step sponsors.

Though the intent of the sponsors of the meeting — the Center, the Community Leadership Forum, the Live and Let Live Alano Club, Stepping Stone and a long list of other endorsers — was to warn the Queer community at large about meth, so much of the audience consisted of Dr. Chauppette’s professional colleagues that when co-moderator Shawn Ingram looked for people who weren’t therapists to ask questions, he had a hard time finding any. One question she was asked was why there don’t seem to be any “recreational users” — people who can take meth occasionally without becoming addicted — and whether advertisements showing people whose lives have been wrecked on crystal would be an effective prevention tool.

“For years, we’ve been trying to use public-service announcements to show the wreckage,” Dr. Chauppette replied. “We know it’s attention-grabbing, but the immediate thought people have is, ‘Oh, no, that won’t happen to me. I’ll never let it get to that point.’ … I know very few people who use this drug recreationally for more than six months [without becoming addicted]. Do people exist who can use this drug recreationally? Yes, but not if they have any family history of any sort of addiction. The window is very small.”

The following contact information was passed out at the meeting for people who are problem users of methamphetamine and want help in getting off the drug:

Stepping Stone
(619) 584-4010
 http://www.steppingstone.org

The Center’s Counseling Services
(619) 260-6380 x105
 http://www.thecentersd.org

Drug and Alcohol Crisis Hotline
1-(800) 479-3339

The Live and Let Live Alano Club
(619) 298-8008

Other Web sites:

 http://www.gmhc.org/programs/crystal.html
 http://www.tweaker.org
 http://www.crystalneon.org
 http://www.crystalrecovery.com

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net