How to Do Drugs
What I wish someone had told me about drugs and chemsex.
I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written primarily for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This isn’t a Q&A—it’s me sharing my own advice on sex, dating, and connection.
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Like many gay men, my social life involves forbidden substances. Drugs are part of queer nightlife and culture, and always have been. This doesn’t mean every gay man or queer person does them or has to do them—but even if you choose to abstain, I think it’s tough, maybe even impossible, to live as an MSM (man who has sex with men, however you choose to identify) and avoid drugs entirely.
Your friends, fuck buddies, and lovers will be doing them, which means they’ll at least be offered to you. Drugs are part of our world, so even those who don’t partake must learn to live alongside them, because the people we know and love are getting high.
People do drugs because they’re fun.
This was how it started for me: One night on a dance floor in Atlanta, a guy I’d been pawing all night put his thumb to my ear and shouted, “DO YOU WANT A MOLLY?” I nodded yes, having no idea what it was. He gave me a bluish, foul-tasting half of a pill, which I swallowed with some water from the bathroom sink.
The night ahead was mind-blowing, unnerving, wondrous—a thrilling, beautiful roll on a drug that causes intense feelings of connection, creativity, and euphoria, often followed by a moody, emotional crash. Though some kids call it “Molly,” its signature euphoria gives the drug its classic name: Ecstasy. (For a plain-language overview of MDMA, see the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s page on MDMA/Ecstasy/Molly.)
That was my first drug night, and since then, I’ve had many—some equally beautiful, and some far less so. Some were very, very dark.
Over the years, I’ve learned that some people prefer uppers, some prefer downers, some like losing control, and others want to retain it. Despite the extensive history of drug use (and misuse) among MSM, some of us never touch these substances—but most will, at least in my experience. That’s fine. I’m not anti-drug and never will be, and anti-drug messages don’t help anyone be safe. So let’s talk about harm reduction.
What is harm reduction?
All drugs carry some health risk—most fun things do—so harm reduction is a modern, non-abstinence approach of minimising risk and harm by learning and teaching ways to consume drugs more safely.
First things first: If you or someone you’re with needs help right now, call emergency services. In the U.S., you can call/text 988 for crisis support, including substance-use crises. If you’re in Berlin and you’re worried about poisoning/intoxication, save the Giftnotruf der Charité (24/7 expert phone advice). If you’re in the U.S. and you’re using alone, Never Use Alone is a confidential hotline where someone stays on the line and can call for help if you stop responding.
I mentioned drugs briefly in my sex-ed slideshow “17 Tips for Happier, Healthier Bottoming” in The Advocate for my Sexy Beast column. Here’s an excerpt:
Sex drugs are invariably part of our world, so it would be a disservice for me to say “Don’t do drugs” and let that be the end of it. I am not sweepingly anti-drug, although I believe certain substances—heroin, meth—should be avoided. Drugs come with a plethora of risks all on their own. They can lower your ability to fight infection, may diminish the efficacy of your antiretroviral medication, and can obviously cause severe addictions along with a slew of harmful side effects.
(If you take HIV meds, PrEP, or PEP, and you want to check potential interactions, the Liverpool HIV Drug Interactions checker is one of the best quick tools online.)
After that post in The Advocate was published, I got some messages on social media from folks asking about drugs, particularly as they pertain to sex. If you want more tips on bottoming, read the full article. Here, I will write a little more about drugs, particularly the ones used for sex and bottoming, since there exists a unique relationship between passive gay sex and substance use (and misuse, and abuse).
Do drugs make bottoming easier?
Yes. Most of my experience with drugs involves sex parties, dance parties, and extreme sex practices like fisting, and my relationship to drugs is bound up in bottoming. Like many men, I learned that my insecurities around sexual performance and, in particular, my fear of making a mess (poop) on a man’s dick could be silenced with drugs; for a long time, I used drugs as chemical confidence to silence this fear.
Even though stimulant drugs notoriously upset and activate the bowels and actually increase the likelihood of making a mess during anal sex, I was still, for years, nearly always clean, so in time the fact grew obvious: My body was clearly able to have mess-free anal sex on its own. In time, I realised I was just using drugs to feel confident and sexy. Even after my fear of poop waned, I kept using chems to make sex happen, even when I didn’t feel sexual. Sex got more connected and more intentional when I learned to follow the contours of my own natural desires rather than force them into place with substances, and though I still enjoy some chemsex, I now practice the 50/50 rule—at least half of all my sexual experiences need to be sober.
Over the years, I’ve talked to countless gay men about this, and it’s clear that passive MSM (bottoms) in particular struggle with drugs for similar reasons I have: tops don’t share our fears of making a mess so they don’t need chemical courage in quite the same way (and they learn quickly that chems are more likely to inhibit an erection than engender one). To say that drug misuse and abuse are limited to bottoms is false, but we do tend to have unique relationships with them because of what they help us achieve: confident bottoming in a stressful sexual landscape that often appears to demand a pristine, mess-free sex experience. It’s understandable that this pressure (from porn, from culture) makes many of us need drugs to feel sexy and strong.
This knowledge helps. If we can recognise what we’re using drugs to overcome, we can work on the root problem—our own fears and insecurities around bottoming. Just as with anything else, mess-free bottoming and douching get easier with practice. "(With practice, all sex gets easier.) Confident sober sex will get easier the more you practice it. There’s no need to make all sex sober, but the 50/50 rule is a best practice.
Do drugs make kink and fisting easier?
Yes. But when you’re a beginner, kink play and anything that may be considered BDSM should be done sober. Kink and BDSM are about pushing your mental and physical limits and playing with a wide range of sensations, both pleasurable and painful. Drugs can limit—and numb—your ability to detect pain, meaning you might push yourself too far and get injured. Once you know what you’re doing and are no longer a novice—which may take years—then, and only then, is it ok to start introducing substances into your sessions, and only in small doses.
Never play with a dominant who is drunk or high. Their ability to read your body language and your breathing will be impaired, and they can hurt you. In fisting and ass play—my favourite fetish—a fucked-up top can put you in the hospital, and you can be permanently injured and diminish (or destroy) your ability to fist in the future.
Fisting is amazing, but it’s an extreme sex sport. Respect its risks. Fisting is one of the most intense experiences you can have with someone. Going a little slower and being sober, at least when you’re first learning how to get fisted, will not diminish the extraordinary feeling when he gets a hand in your butt.
I won’t say drugs make no difference—they’re fun, and they do make fisting easier as a bottom. Drugs can make any sex (even bad sex) feel great. But you need to know and respect the risks. It’s easy to push your body too far, and I know many men—skilled and experienced fisters, all of them—who’ve gotten hurt and gone to the hospital because they got too high and went too hard.
The excellent book Fist Me! The Complete Guide to Fisting by Stephan Niederwieser is one I recommend for folks with fisting aspirations. For more reading, try Trust, The Hand Book: A Guide to the Sensual and Spiritual Art of Handballing by Bert Herrman. The latter is more spiritual and esoteric, but it’s part of the canon of fisting literature.
Do drugs make clubbing easier?
Absolutely. The older you get, the more you’ll learn that the human body is not meant to rave for ten hours. If you take drugs at a club or sex party (almost everyone there will be), have someone you can check in with regularly. As with alcohol, never get in a car with a high driver behind the wheel. Uber, Lyft, and other ride-sharing apps are must-haves on your phone.
As far as specific drugs go, steer clear of injecting anything into your body. Injection drug use can raise the risk of infections like hepatitis C. (If you want a harm-reduction guide that’s written for people who actually use drugs, not people scolding them, the Deutsche Aidsilfe Safer Use portal is excellent.)
And this goes without saying, but anything you inject—meth, heroin—is highly addictive, and it’s easier to overdose with injection drug use.
Let’s talk a bit more about Tina.
Since the drug of the moment is Tina (crystal meth), I have to talk about it more in-depth as someone who’s struggled in my own way with it. The long-term effects of meth are worse than the short-term effects. Over time, the drug can rewire the ways your brain experiences pleasure, including sexual pleasure.
This creates a dependency—a need to use meth in order to enjoy sex, plus everything else that’s pleasurable. Experiencing happiness can start to feel psychologically dependent on the substance. (For a clear, non-moralising medical overview, see NIDA’s page on methamphetamine.) Long-term users can find that their only way to stay clean involves celibacy. The drug is fun, but it’s not worth losing your sex life.
Let’s talk a bit more about G.
The other drug of the moment is G. There are different kinds of G, like GBL and GHB. Outside of recreational use, G is primarily used as an industrial cleaner. It’s highly potent and toxic and can dissolve plastic. Keep that in mind. Never combine GHB with alcohol—the results can be fatal, and often are.
Let’s talk about other drugs.
In general, it’s unwise to combine drugs. Some guys swear that certain drugs enhance each other, but remember this: You never know how drugs will interact because you never truly know what you’re taking. Assume that no drug is “pure.” Street drugs are cut with different substances, some of which may not interact well with whatever else you take. You increase your risk of a fatal interaction when you combine them.
MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly, E, XTC, X) is an empathogenic stimulant that releases the brain’s natural stores of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters that regulate empathy and arousal. The result is unbridled horniness, intense feelings of empathy (which can lead to beautiful, intimate experiences), and typically some hallucinogenic effects—brighter colours, richer sounds, and a heightened sense of touch. MDMA is now considered a “non-classic” psychedelic (more on that below).
As I wrote in my Advocate slideshow, E/Molly will act as an accelerant (as will most stimulants), meaning that unless you have done a thorough douching and fasted beforehand, the drug will probably make you poop and require you to douche again before anal sex. But many guys don’t consider E a sex drug—it’s dance floor candy.
My favourite drugs are traditional psychedelics: magic mushrooms (psilocybin), acid (LSD), DMT, and so on. I do magic mushroom trips on a regular basis. They help with my depression, and some years ago, they helped me sort out my relationship with meth. (I write more about this journey in a post for Out Magazine.)
I believe psychedelics made me a better person, and I think that in a generation or so, science will catch up and society will view these substances as medicine, not substances of abuse. But people have been saying the same about marijuana for generations, yet it remains classified as a criminal drug in many parts of the world.
A psychedelic trip is an extreme experience that can just as easily be horrifying as blissful. I’ve had bad trips in which I truly thought I was going to die. You have to take these compounds seriously—and, if you can, have a friend or guide experienced with these substances with you, in case some overwhelming, unpleasant, or frightening feelings and images come up when you trip.
But that’s a good rule for all substances: Don’t do them alone. Drugs need friends.
Drugs are social tools—always involve others.
This brings me to the core idea of harm reduction, and something I believe is key to a healthy and happy life with drugs: Always involve others.
I cannot go into all harm-reduction strategies necessary for all drugs, and the harm-reduction strategies for a good psychedelic trip get even more complex. Trips are typically not physically dangerous, but they can be very unpleasant; unlike standard stimulant drugs, the environment and intention behind a psychedelic trip powerfully affect its experience and intensity. So I’ll simply (strongly) encourage you to read Modern Psychedelics: The Handbook for Mindful Exploration by Joe Dolce, an excellent, judgment-free handbook that compiles contemporary research and ancient knowledge to guide adult readers who are interested in the mindful exploration of these misunderstood, extraordinary, powerful substances.
Psychedelics are less associated with physical dependence than other drugs, and fatal overdose is uncommon, but they are not “risk-free.” Bad reactions, unsafe settings, mixing substances, and accidents can still hurt you. Use caution.
No matter the drug, harm reduction saves lives. Since people are going to do drugs no matter what anyone says, we can do away with the myth that telling people the dangers of certain drugs will decrease or halt their use. Harm reduction involves learning what small steps you can take to keep yourself and your friends safe.
Drink plenty of water—even set reminders on your phone to hydrate. Always have an “exit strategy”—a way to safely leave wherever you are and get home, a person you can call, whatever. Never do drugs if you feel pressured to do them. Always make sure you and everyone you’re with has a safe, sober way to get home, and if at any point someone does not feel well, take them (or yourself, if it’s you) to an emergency room. Do not wait.
When I use, I try to practice a philosophy of drug enjoyment: If you’re feeling good, don’t add anything more. The impulse when you’re high is to think, “Hey, I feel great! If I add more, maybe I’ll feel even more great!” Nope. Adding more drugs is more likely to make you feel worse than better. If you feel good, rest there for a bit. Add more once it wanes.
Test your drugs for purity.
The most important (and most disregarded) rule: Test your drugs. If you’re in Berlin, start with drugchecking.berlin (free, anonymous, legal drug checking, a huge public-health win). If you’re elsewhere, the CDC has a straightforward explainer on fentanyl test strips and how to use them, and DanceSafe’s fentanyl info is also solid. Street drugs can contain fentanyl (including stimulants and pressed pills), which is why testing matters. Fentanyl is deadly—read the CDC’s fentanyl overview.
You can probably find testing kits at your local LGBTQ centre, and you can order them online. In parts of the U.S., NEXT Distro can help people access test strips (availability varies by location).
Take care of each other.
If you see someone who looks like they might have done too much—if they’re dizzy, falling out, incoherent, pale, or look like they might pass out—you may need to call emergency services or find someone working the event and tell them this person needs help immediately. People overdose at parties all the time. You can save a life. It takes no time to check on someone.
And if you don’t like drugs, keep your opinions to yourself, because shaming someone’s use is not helpful and will make you sound like an unsafe person to ask for help and support. Be someone your friends can talk to about drugs. This starts by not shaming and judging their use.
Remember: there are no “good” drugs and “bad” drugs. All drugs are substances that alter our brains and change how we think. Some are more addictive than others, but they all can cause problems. Judging the substance—and judging those who use a substance—helps no one. Getting them home safely does.
Love, Beastly