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The trouble with Tina:
Crystal meth addiction brings on ‘absolute hell,’ HIV risks
By CHRISTOPHER SEELY
Sunday, October 19
Sex on crystal meth linked to rise in HIV infections
On a recent weekend, an Atlanta man who asked to be identified only as “Shy” spent three days awake with his boyfriend — snorting crystal methamphetamine and having “animalistic” unprotected sex with five or six guys he met on-line.
“Shy,” in his early 30s, started using the drug two years ago recreationally and tries to limit his weekend drug and sex orgies to once a month, he said. But the more he uses the drug, the more frequent his weekend binges become.
“When you are tired from working throughout the week and you want to put yourself in the mood to go out to clubs, it gives you what you need to have,” he said. “Some people drink coffee in the morning, some people do Tina in the morning. Having Tina gives you the energy you need to participate in the scene.”
“Tina” drives up “Shy’s” sexual encounters from a sober one-to-two hour session to a drug-induced 24 hours or days-long session of sex, which is usually why he snorts it, he said.
“You play with your dick so much that your balls are red for the next five days,” he said. “Tina takes you down to the level of basically our roots as men — the animalistic part of yourself. You kind of lose your head and the next thing you know you are having sex for as many hours as you can with as many people as you can.”
Crystal methamphetamine — also known as crystal, crank, tweak, T, go-fast, speed and Tina — is an amphetamine-based drug designed to stimulate the central nervous system. It is typically snorted, smoked, injected or swallowed and has become a favorite drug among club-goers, notably among gay men.
“Shy” does not identify as an addict, but cautioned he does not want to glamorize the drug because he has witnessed “beautiful, attractive, young” friends become skeletal and mentally wasted.
“There is no control with Tina,” he said. “You think you have it but you don’t. The Tina train just gets faster and faster and faster.”
Meth use more common in gay men
An estimated 8.8 million people (four percent of the population) have tried methamphetamine at some time in their lives, up from 4.8 million in 1996, according to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
But that national percentage is more than doubled for gay men, according to a 2001 Urban Men’s Health Study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California.
“Specifically, crystal methamphetamine is a drug that many gay men find to be addictive and that is hard to stop once you get heavily involved with it,” said Ron Stall, chief of the Behavioral Intervention Branch in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at CDC.
The study’s statistics, collected from a sampling in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, show that nationally 9.5 percent of gay men used crystal methamphetamine in the six months prior to the study.
In San Francisco, officials at the Department of Public Health estimate that up to 40 percent of gay men in San Francisco have tried crystal meth. The department links the use of crystal meth to an increase of HIV infection in the area, according to a May 2003 report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
No similar studies have been conducted in Atlanta, according to Michelle Allan, a spokesperson for the Fulton County Department of Health & Wellness’ Communicable Disease Prevention Branch.
But the epidemic’s eastern migration is imminent, Stall said.
“The crystal meth epidemic showed up on the West Coast about five or six years ago in a big way,” Stall said. “Like many of those trends that start in California, it has moved its way across America going east.”
Methamphetamine has increased in popularity and become prevalent in Georgia, particularly in metro Atlanta, Dalton and Gainesville, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Web site.
The agency reports 105.3 kilograms of crystal meth seized in 2002 in Georgia.
The Atlanta Police Department’s categorization of drug offenses does not yield accurate data about how prevalent the drug is in the city of Atlanta, said Sgt. John Quigley, an APD spokesperson.
Unsafe sex on meth risks HIV
One of the most life-threatening problems related to crystal meth abuse is its strong link to risky sex and HIV transmission, said Michael Siever, director of the Stonewall Project, a San Francisco-based harm reduction counseling program for gay and bisexual men.
“The two issues are intertwined,” Siever said. “A lot of men shoot speed and that’s a possible method of HIV transmission. And secondly, the reality for most gay men is that when they get high, they tend to have sex. Speed keeps them high for days on end. They fuck as many people as they can fuck with nary a condom in sight.”
The San Francisco Health Department found that at one high-risk clinic, 25 percent to 30 percent of gay men with new infections used crystal meth in the previous six months, according to the May 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article.
“What I hear again and again is that this drug is a very dangerous drug and it is fueling the AIDS epidemic on the West Coast,” Stall said.
Without similar studies in Atlanta, the link between HIV transmission and crystal meth use is difficult to quantify, but some gay men who seek counseling at Positive Impact directly link the two, said Danny Sprouse, a counselor at the agency.
Positive Impact provides mental health services to HIV-positive people in Atlanta.
“In the clients I have seen personally who are struggling with crystal meth, the majority of those individuals report in engaging in unsafe sex, anal intercourse without a condom,” Sprouse said.
Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the gay men Sprouse counsels attribute their HIV infection to crystal meth use, he said.
“Crystal meth lowers inhibitions so a person is much more inclined to act on the impulse of feeling,” Sprouse said.
“Shy”, who is HIV-negative, tries to practice safe sex, but sometimes the crystal meth he snorts alters his better judgement, he said. His past two Tina sex binges went unprotected.
“It takes your inhibitions and throws them out the window,” Shy said. “You don’t worry if anyone has a disease or anything.”
Road to recovery ‘absolute hell’
Charles, a recovering addict in Atlanta who asked to be identified by first name only, spent last weekend, Oct. 10-12, in Phoenix, Ariz., at the Crystal Meth Anonymous North American retreat.
Crystal Meth Anonymous is a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Charles was part of a small group that started the Atlanta branch of CMA in 2001. He’s been recovering since 1999.
What began in Atlanta as a 15-member group that met once a week blossomed into a 100-member base, with members now able to choose among eight weekly meetings, Charles said. An offshoot of the Atlanta group started meeting in Marietta three weeks ago.
“Withdrawing from crystal was just absolute hell,” Charles said. “I was crying 24 hours a day for days on end, sleeping a lot, feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin, and there was depression like you have never felt depression.”
The Atlanta CMA chapter, which is “99.9 percent” gay men, offers comfort and help coping with depression, Charles said.
“One of the things we have in common is we experience a degree of loneliness that is abysmal, an incredible loneliness,” he said. “What the drug does for a lot of people like me is it takes away a feeling of inadequacy to make us feel like we can go out confidently into the world — a twisted part of the world.”
To afford the $2,000 to $3,000 of crystal meth that he injected every week, Charles prostituted himself through the Internet.
“Sex addiction is part of my story,” he said. “With the crystal, I could stay up for three or four days and have sex with 30 to 40 guys easily.”
Charles used Viagra so he could maintain an erection to be a “top-only” prostitute.
“That’s part of what allowed me to be able to just concentrate on having sex with people,” he said.
Paranoid that police were outside his home, Charles recalled checking the window every 10 to 15 minutes.
“Toward the end of my use, it was about looking out the window and making sure there were no cops there,” he said. “I would hear things and feel like I was being watched.”
Paranoia proved common among his addicted friends, he said.
“I had some friends who changed locks on their doors two or three times a week because they felt like there were people breaking in and moving things around … or that cops had installed cameras in their attic,” he said.
It only took six months of injecting for Charles’ crystal meth habit, coupled with the unauthorized Viagra prescription, to stop his heart from beating.
“I had been up for three days and done lots of crystal and Viagra,” he said. “I felt a tingling sensation in the back of my spine that traveled up my spine and all the sudden I couldn’t breathe and my heart started racing and skipping beats.”
The last thing he remembers before he awoke in Grady Hospital was dialing 911.
“I flat-lined at Grady and that’s how bad it had to get for me before I decided to get help,” he said.
Joe Crea contributed to this report.
---------------------------------------------------------
Crystal’s troubled past:
1919 | Drug first synthesized in Japan.
1927 | British chemist Gordon Alles discovered the stimulating effects of meth, including increased alertness, fatigue alleviation and euphoria.
1932 | A U.S. pharmaceutical company bought the patent to the Alles discovery. He then marketed the drug as a nasal decongestant, an inhalant called Benzedrine, or “beanies.” Users would take apart the inhalers and suck out the speed.
1939-1945 | Amphetamines were sanctioned by a number of governments during World War II, including Nazi Germany, the U.S. and Japan for their energizing and antidepressant properties. It is estimated that millions of Japanese soldiers, defense workers and civilians used amphetamines and that by the end of the war, at least two percent of the adult Japanese population was dependent on the drug. Post-war studies of American military prisoners revealed that a notable number reported abusing amphetamine inhalers.
Methamphetamine use was reportedly high among Japanese and other soldiers during World War II due to the drug’s energizing and anti-depressant qualities. (Photo by AP)
1959 | The first use in the U.S. of intravenous injection of the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler for non-medicinal purposes was reported.
1971 | The last non-prescription inhaler was removed from the U.S. market pursuant to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
2003 | In the U.S., there have been three distinct methamphetamine epidemics: one in the 1950s, a second in the late 1960s, and the current one that began in the mid-1990s. What makes the current epidemic especially dangerous for gay users is the correlation between meth use and HIV infection as gay men take increased risks on speed that they would not ordinarily take.
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.sovo.com/2003/10-17/news/national/tina.cfm
Crystal meth addiction brings on ‘absolute hell,’ HIV risks
By CHRISTOPHER SEELY
Sunday, October 19
Sex on crystal meth linked to rise in HIV infections
On a recent weekend, an Atlanta man who asked to be identified only as “Shy” spent three days awake with his boyfriend — snorting crystal methamphetamine and having “animalistic” unprotected sex with five or six guys he met on-line.
“Shy,” in his early 30s, started using the drug two years ago recreationally and tries to limit his weekend drug and sex orgies to once a month, he said. But the more he uses the drug, the more frequent his weekend binges become.
“When you are tired from working throughout the week and you want to put yourself in the mood to go out to clubs, it gives you what you need to have,” he said. “Some people drink coffee in the morning, some people do Tina in the morning. Having Tina gives you the energy you need to participate in the scene.”
“Tina” drives up “Shy’s” sexual encounters from a sober one-to-two hour session to a drug-induced 24 hours or days-long session of sex, which is usually why he snorts it, he said.
“You play with your dick so much that your balls are red for the next five days,” he said. “Tina takes you down to the level of basically our roots as men — the animalistic part of yourself. You kind of lose your head and the next thing you know you are having sex for as many hours as you can with as many people as you can.”
Crystal methamphetamine — also known as crystal, crank, tweak, T, go-fast, speed and Tina — is an amphetamine-based drug designed to stimulate the central nervous system. It is typically snorted, smoked, injected or swallowed and has become a favorite drug among club-goers, notably among gay men.
“Shy” does not identify as an addict, but cautioned he does not want to glamorize the drug because he has witnessed “beautiful, attractive, young” friends become skeletal and mentally wasted.
“There is no control with Tina,” he said. “You think you have it but you don’t. The Tina train just gets faster and faster and faster.”
Meth use more common in gay men
An estimated 8.8 million people (four percent of the population) have tried methamphetamine at some time in their lives, up from 4.8 million in 1996, according to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
But that national percentage is more than doubled for gay men, according to a 2001 Urban Men’s Health Study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California.
“Specifically, crystal methamphetamine is a drug that many gay men find to be addictive and that is hard to stop once you get heavily involved with it,” said Ron Stall, chief of the Behavioral Intervention Branch in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at CDC.
The study’s statistics, collected from a sampling in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, show that nationally 9.5 percent of gay men used crystal methamphetamine in the six months prior to the study.
In San Francisco, officials at the Department of Public Health estimate that up to 40 percent of gay men in San Francisco have tried crystal meth. The department links the use of crystal meth to an increase of HIV infection in the area, according to a May 2003 report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
No similar studies have been conducted in Atlanta, according to Michelle Allan, a spokesperson for the Fulton County Department of Health & Wellness’ Communicable Disease Prevention Branch.
But the epidemic’s eastern migration is imminent, Stall said.
“The crystal meth epidemic showed up on the West Coast about five or six years ago in a big way,” Stall said. “Like many of those trends that start in California, it has moved its way across America going east.”
Methamphetamine has increased in popularity and become prevalent in Georgia, particularly in metro Atlanta, Dalton and Gainesville, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Web site.
The agency reports 105.3 kilograms of crystal meth seized in 2002 in Georgia.
The Atlanta Police Department’s categorization of drug offenses does not yield accurate data about how prevalent the drug is in the city of Atlanta, said Sgt. John Quigley, an APD spokesperson.
Unsafe sex on meth risks HIV
One of the most life-threatening problems related to crystal meth abuse is its strong link to risky sex and HIV transmission, said Michael Siever, director of the Stonewall Project, a San Francisco-based harm reduction counseling program for gay and bisexual men.
“The two issues are intertwined,” Siever said. “A lot of men shoot speed and that’s a possible method of HIV transmission. And secondly, the reality for most gay men is that when they get high, they tend to have sex. Speed keeps them high for days on end. They fuck as many people as they can fuck with nary a condom in sight.”
The San Francisco Health Department found that at one high-risk clinic, 25 percent to 30 percent of gay men with new infections used crystal meth in the previous six months, according to the May 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article.
“What I hear again and again is that this drug is a very dangerous drug and it is fueling the AIDS epidemic on the West Coast,” Stall said.
Without similar studies in Atlanta, the link between HIV transmission and crystal meth use is difficult to quantify, but some gay men who seek counseling at Positive Impact directly link the two, said Danny Sprouse, a counselor at the agency.
Positive Impact provides mental health services to HIV-positive people in Atlanta.
“In the clients I have seen personally who are struggling with crystal meth, the majority of those individuals report in engaging in unsafe sex, anal intercourse without a condom,” Sprouse said.
Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the gay men Sprouse counsels attribute their HIV infection to crystal meth use, he said.
“Crystal meth lowers inhibitions so a person is much more inclined to act on the impulse of feeling,” Sprouse said.
“Shy”, who is HIV-negative, tries to practice safe sex, but sometimes the crystal meth he snorts alters his better judgement, he said. His past two Tina sex binges went unprotected.
“It takes your inhibitions and throws them out the window,” Shy said. “You don’t worry if anyone has a disease or anything.”
Road to recovery ‘absolute hell’
Charles, a recovering addict in Atlanta who asked to be identified by first name only, spent last weekend, Oct. 10-12, in Phoenix, Ariz., at the Crystal Meth Anonymous North American retreat.
Crystal Meth Anonymous is a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Charles was part of a small group that started the Atlanta branch of CMA in 2001. He’s been recovering since 1999.
What began in Atlanta as a 15-member group that met once a week blossomed into a 100-member base, with members now able to choose among eight weekly meetings, Charles said. An offshoot of the Atlanta group started meeting in Marietta three weeks ago.
“Withdrawing from crystal was just absolute hell,” Charles said. “I was crying 24 hours a day for days on end, sleeping a lot, feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin, and there was depression like you have never felt depression.”
The Atlanta CMA chapter, which is “99.9 percent” gay men, offers comfort and help coping with depression, Charles said.
“One of the things we have in common is we experience a degree of loneliness that is abysmal, an incredible loneliness,” he said. “What the drug does for a lot of people like me is it takes away a feeling of inadequacy to make us feel like we can go out confidently into the world — a twisted part of the world.”
To afford the $2,000 to $3,000 of crystal meth that he injected every week, Charles prostituted himself through the Internet.
“Sex addiction is part of my story,” he said. “With the crystal, I could stay up for three or four days and have sex with 30 to 40 guys easily.”
Charles used Viagra so he could maintain an erection to be a “top-only” prostitute.
“That’s part of what allowed me to be able to just concentrate on having sex with people,” he said.
Paranoid that police were outside his home, Charles recalled checking the window every 10 to 15 minutes.
“Toward the end of my use, it was about looking out the window and making sure there were no cops there,” he said. “I would hear things and feel like I was being watched.”
Paranoia proved common among his addicted friends, he said.
“I had some friends who changed locks on their doors two or three times a week because they felt like there were people breaking in and moving things around … or that cops had installed cameras in their attic,” he said.
It only took six months of injecting for Charles’ crystal meth habit, coupled with the unauthorized Viagra prescription, to stop his heart from beating.
“I had been up for three days and done lots of crystal and Viagra,” he said. “I felt a tingling sensation in the back of my spine that traveled up my spine and all the sudden I couldn’t breathe and my heart started racing and skipping beats.”
The last thing he remembers before he awoke in Grady Hospital was dialing 911.
“I flat-lined at Grady and that’s how bad it had to get for me before I decided to get help,” he said.
Joe Crea contributed to this report.
---------------------------------------------------------
Crystal’s troubled past:
1919 | Drug first synthesized in Japan.
1927 | British chemist Gordon Alles discovered the stimulating effects of meth, including increased alertness, fatigue alleviation and euphoria.
1932 | A U.S. pharmaceutical company bought the patent to the Alles discovery. He then marketed the drug as a nasal decongestant, an inhalant called Benzedrine, or “beanies.” Users would take apart the inhalers and suck out the speed.
1939-1945 | Amphetamines were sanctioned by a number of governments during World War II, including Nazi Germany, the U.S. and Japan for their energizing and antidepressant properties. It is estimated that millions of Japanese soldiers, defense workers and civilians used amphetamines and that by the end of the war, at least two percent of the adult Japanese population was dependent on the drug. Post-war studies of American military prisoners revealed that a notable number reported abusing amphetamine inhalers.
Methamphetamine use was reportedly high among Japanese and other soldiers during World War II due to the drug’s energizing and anti-depressant qualities. (Photo by AP)
1959 | The first use in the U.S. of intravenous injection of the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler for non-medicinal purposes was reported.
1971 | The last non-prescription inhaler was removed from the U.S. market pursuant to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
2003 | In the U.S., there have been three distinct methamphetamine epidemics: one in the 1950s, a second in the late 1960s, and the current one that began in the mid-1990s. What makes the current epidemic especially dangerous for gay users is the correlation between meth use and HIV infection as gay men take increased risks on speed that they would not ordinarily take.
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.sovo.com/2003/10-17/news/national/tina.cfm
