Michael Specter’s Higher Risk is about “crystal meth, the Internet, and dangerous choices about AIDS.” It reads like a piece devised specifically to horrify social conservatives:
The first thing people on methamphetamine lose is their common sense; suddenly, anything goes, including unprotected anal sex with many different partners in a single night — which is among the most efficient ways to spread H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In recent surveys, more than ten per cent of gay men in San Francisco and Los Angeles report having used the drug in the past six months; in New York, the figure is even higher.
After years of living in constant fear of AIDS, many gay men have chosen to resume sexual practices that are almost guaranteed to make them sick. In New York City, the rate of syphilis has increased by more than four hundred per cent in the past five years. Gay men account for virtually the entire rise. Between 1998 and 2000, fifteen per cent of the syphilis cases in Chicago could be attributed to gay men. Since 2001, that number has grown to sixty per cent. Look at the statistics closely and you will almost certainly find the drug. In one recent study, twenty-five per cent of those men who reported methamphetamine use in the previous month were infected with H.I.V. The drug appears to double the risk of infection (because it erases inhibitions but also, it seems, because of physiological changes that make the virus easier to transmit), and the risk climbs the more one uses it. Over the past several years, nearly every indicator of risky sexual activity has risen in the gay community. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the number of men who say they use condoms regularly is below fifty per cent; after many years of decline, the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses among gay men increased every year between 2000 and 2003, while remaining stable in the rest of the population.
An illustrative anecdote:
“I asked him to explain. And he told me, ‘I go online and put out my stats — if I am a top or a bottom, what I like to do. I am a top, I am H.I.V.-positive. So I will say, “Does anyone want to be topped by an H.I.V.-positive guy?” ’ ”
Klausner continued to recall the conversation: “ ‘I’ll get five responses in half an hour. And then I will speak to them on the phone. If I like their voice, I will invite them over and look through my window. If I like what I see, then I will be home, and if not I can pretend I am gone. It’s been great. I don’t have to talk to anybody to do it. I don’t have to go out of the house. I can get it like this,’ he said, and snapped his fingers.”
The amphetamines, combined with Viagra, allow the men to “party” for hours, and the Internet lets them find anonymous partners. Modern HIV drugs have removed the fear (and stigma) of disease. But here’s where it’s particularly crazy:
But the average age of newly infected gay men in New York and San Francisco is nearly forty. The real problem lay not with naïve youngsters but with those who had been aware of this epidemic virtually their entire adult lives.
(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com — which suddenly sounds lewd.)