Health | When do we give up G?
By David Mills
ARQ GETS RAIDED, CLUBBERS KEEP DROPPING AND ONE YOUNG MAN DIES FROM AN OVERDOSE. WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE FOR THE GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY TO GIVE UP ON G?
There is no easy answer to the question posed in the introduction to this story.
This is the problem: on the one hand, drug educators feel they can’t give sufficient “harm minimisation” messages to GHB users because the drug is inherently risky; on the other hand, they think that people are going to take it anyway and demonising the drug, or the users, will just drive the drug-taking underground.
It’s a helluva Catch-22, but then – it’s a helluva fucked-up situation as well. Police claim that 11 people showed up at hospitals last Saturday night having overdosed on G – most of whom, they say, had been at Arq nightclub (the club owners say they were aware of only two overdoses on the night). The Ruby party in August saw five people drop after taking the drug and, on the same weekend, a 20-year-old gay man died of a GHB overdose.
But still the partying goes on … and when something bad happens, like a death or an overdose, the excuses come out: It Must Have Been A Bad Batch; He/She Was Inexperienced And Didn’t Know What He/She Was Doing.
Drug educator Paul Dillon, who writes the Star’s weekly column The Deal On Drugs, describes the “bad batch” excuse as “ridiculous and stupid”.
“[The term] ‘bad batch’ implies that there are good batches, and the reality is that this is a risky drug, and it’s a cop-out to say there was something wrong with [the batch],” he says.
The idea that it’s only inexperienced users who overdose on G is another fallacy, Dillon argues.
“No matter how much experience you’ve had, things can still go wrong. If something hasn’t gone wrong yet, it probably will eventually – and you can’t say that for most other drugs,” he says.
This is backed up by research, undertaken by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Council (where Dillon works) and ACON two years ago. That research showed that while only one percent of GHB users thought they could be susceptible to an overdose, 50 percent of users had overdosed and 25 percent of those who had overdosed had done so on more than one occasion. (Staff at St Vincent’s hospital have been known to treat the same patient for GHB overdoses as many as six times.)
“It is very, very difficult to give harm minimisation messages for this drug, because the difference between having a good time and finding yourself unconscious in a hospital ward is very, very close,” Dillon says.
Full story HERE
One would think it's only the Gay & Lesbian people taking G 8)
By David Mills
ARQ GETS RAIDED, CLUBBERS KEEP DROPPING AND ONE YOUNG MAN DIES FROM AN OVERDOSE. WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE FOR THE GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY TO GIVE UP ON G?
There is no easy answer to the question posed in the introduction to this story.
This is the problem: on the one hand, drug educators feel they can’t give sufficient “harm minimisation” messages to GHB users because the drug is inherently risky; on the other hand, they think that people are going to take it anyway and demonising the drug, or the users, will just drive the drug-taking underground.
It’s a helluva Catch-22, but then – it’s a helluva fucked-up situation as well. Police claim that 11 people showed up at hospitals last Saturday night having overdosed on G – most of whom, they say, had been at Arq nightclub (the club owners say they were aware of only two overdoses on the night). The Ruby party in August saw five people drop after taking the drug and, on the same weekend, a 20-year-old gay man died of a GHB overdose.
But still the partying goes on … and when something bad happens, like a death or an overdose, the excuses come out: It Must Have Been A Bad Batch; He/She Was Inexperienced And Didn’t Know What He/She Was Doing.
Drug educator Paul Dillon, who writes the Star’s weekly column The Deal On Drugs, describes the “bad batch” excuse as “ridiculous and stupid”.
“[The term] ‘bad batch’ implies that there are good batches, and the reality is that this is a risky drug, and it’s a cop-out to say there was something wrong with [the batch],” he says.
The idea that it’s only inexperienced users who overdose on G is another fallacy, Dillon argues.
“No matter how much experience you’ve had, things can still go wrong. If something hasn’t gone wrong yet, it probably will eventually – and you can’t say that for most other drugs,” he says.
This is backed up by research, undertaken by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Council (where Dillon works) and ACON two years ago. That research showed that while only one percent of GHB users thought they could be susceptible to an overdose, 50 percent of users had overdosed and 25 percent of those who had overdosed had done so on more than one occasion. (Staff at St Vincent’s hospital have been known to treat the same patient for GHB overdoses as many as six times.)
“It is very, very difficult to give harm minimisation messages for this drug, because the difference between having a good time and finding yourself unconscious in a hospital ward is very, very close,” Dillon says.
Full story HERE
One would think it's only the Gay & Lesbian people taking G 8)
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
Just to thicken the plot a bit more... I have discussed again with one of these people who is closer to the source and is adamant that it is GBL!