Not All in Good Fun: The ‘Party and Play’ Epidemic Ravages Denver

The first time David Young* smoked crystal meth, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. He had just moved to Denver and was looking for casual sex. He logged into the hookup apps he had downloaded on his phone after a night of drinking, and decided to meet a gentleman at a local bathhouse.

After he arrived, stripped down, and joined the man in a private room, he was casually asked, “Do you party?” Young’s response, not exactly knowing the context of the question, was a hesitant, “Yes.”

Young said his hookup showed him how to hit a white, cloudy pipe for the first time.

“He waited until a little smoke started coming up out of the pipe and told me to inhale,” Young explained. “It didn’t taste good at all, and I had to hold back from coughing. When he finally told me to stop, he handed me the little white towel they give at the bathhouse and told me exhale.”

That night, as cliché as it sounds, sparked a two-year road of combining sex with methamphetamines. Commonly known as ‘party and play’ or ‘partying,’ this is not a new fad within the queer community.

Methamphetamine is a stimulant drug usually used as a white, bitter-tasting powder or a pill. Crystal meth is a form of the drug that looks like glass fragments or shiny, bluish-white rocks. It is chemically similar to the drug used to treat ADHD. It was popular in the early 2000s among gay men looking to enhance sex with chemical highs, and it’s staging a comeback.

In the last couple of years, it has racked up more overdose victims and created a new wave of addicts. But, meth is especially insidious because of the highly addictive qualities, cheap price, and how readily available it is on the streets.

“I’d get really high for really cheap,” Seth Jeffrey* said. Jeffrey has been sober for nearly 10 months after using meth for more than three years. “At first I was just hooking up with men who would share with me, and it was free. Then I started buying and would share with other men who were just getting into it. It’s a really vicious cycle.”

Jeffrey said that he didn’t seek help after he lost job. He didn’t seek help after he injected the drug in his veins for the first time. He didn’t seek help after nearly getting a DUI. He didn’t even seek help when his friends walked out of his life. He finally sought help after watching someone overdose.

The Colorado Department of Public Health’s drug overdose numbers show meth claimed 280 lives in 2017, up from the 196 the year before, and 139 in 2015. Last year’s overdose count was more than five times that recorded in 2012.

Meanwhile, Denver arrests for possession of meth nearly tripled in 2017 compared to 2013. The amount of the substance seized by HIDTA-funded drug task forces across Colorado, as well as by Colorado state patrol officers, also went up from 2016 to 2017.

“It’s scared the sh*t out of me,” Jeffrey said. “It hasn’t been easy. But, I’m almost at a year sober, and I’m still picking up the pieces. The hardest part is still how much I see it being used by the people around me and not being tempted to relapse. I recently downloaded Grindr and immediately had to delete it.”

He’s not wrong. Log onto Grindr in any part of the Denver Metro Area, and at least a dozen thumbnails promoting ‘party and play’ will appear on the screen. With the recent removal of Craigslist personal ads—a main meeting place for ‘partiers’—a surge of profiles on phone dating apps has gone up. This makes the drug that much more accessible and normalized, he explained.

“I spent a good amount of time just staring at it before deleting my profile,” Jeffrey said. “It took a lot of will power, and I’m still pretty proud.”

Jeffrey is one of thousands of people currently in treatment for addiction.

Released in January, the 12th annual report issued by Colorado’s Substance Abuse Trend and Response Task Force cited that the most recent available data from substance abuse treatment admissions indicated that alcohol, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin continue to be the main drugs used by individuals who sought treatment. Meth came in third, with nearly 13 percent—8,600 people—seeking treatment in 2016’s calendar year.

Treatment admission for individuals addicted to methamphetamines increased 34 percent between 2008 and 2015. The numbers leveled in 2016. As seen in previous years, individuals ages 25 to 34 are the highest percentage of the population seeking substance abuse treatment for methamphetamine abuse.

However, Jeffrey is in the minority when it comes to self-seeking treatment.

“I’d say a majority of the people we help do not voluntarily come in for treatment,” Joseph Boyle, program coordinator at The Denver Element, said. One of those programs is the Mile High Recovery Project, an offshoot of Mile High Behavioral Healthcare. This behavioral treatment program encompasses substance use and mental health concerns specifically for bisexual and gay men, by gay men.

The program offers group, one-on-one, and peer-to-peer support groups to help addicts through their recovery—with treatment plans in place to specifically combat meth use. But with the minority of clients voluntarily checking in for treatment, it’s not an easy job.

“We want to see people succeed in these programs,” Boyle said. “We definitely make this as much of a safe space as possible. We try to not be clinical and always be sex positive. We want to meet our clients where they are, and you have to approach queer people seeking treatment differently than straight individuals. That’s what we do.”

The most recent data out of the National Institute on Drug Abuse found members of the LGBTQ community were more than twice as likely to use illegal drugs. Those numbers came from 2015. The Denver Element has been focusing on the gay men that fall in that category for a decade. But, as it reaches double digits in its age, they are expanding their programs to reach, “The L, B, T, Q, I, and As of LGBTQIA within the next six months,” Boyles said.

As a nonprofit, The Denver Element also tries to meet their clients where their wallets are. Accepting medicaid and working on on sliding scale, it is affordable care for the community.

Young, unlike Jeffrey, has yet to seek professional help. It’s been a little more than two years since he first smoked, and while he recognizes he has a problem, the effect has yet to reach his social or professional career, he explained.

“Honestly, you don’t think it’s a problem until you’re at work on Wednesday afternoon planning how you’re going to get high that night. At first it was Friday, then Thursday, and I’m not sure when it will be Tuesday,” Young admitted. “If I could go back to that night I would have never walked to the bathhouse. I’m not sure if it would have changed anything, but I’d like to think this all could have been avoided.”

*Names in this article have been changed to provide anonymity to our sources.