The first time Maik (31) had sex, there was ecstasy right away. To loosen up a bit, said the older man he’d met through a chat box. “I was 15, I had problems with my coming out at home and I got a familiar feeling with him.” The second man, his boss in a stationery store, knew something better and gave him cocaine: “Then you can go on longer, you better keep it up.” The warm feeling Maik got convinced him that he had come home. This was his family. He started with ‘slaming’, injecting drugs into the veins, when he ended up in the Amsterdam gay scene and ended up in the escort. “In the beginning it was still very clumsy,” says Maik. He didn’t think about whether the drugs were good and the needles clean.
He was seventeen. He felt special and valued. “But I was afraid of losing those men. With slamming, first speed, then crystal meth, I could go on longer, push my limits, become even hornier and at the same time feel less. The wishes of the men became more extreme, with crystal meth I could cope better mentally and physically. It made me interesting, I belonged.” The times he used condoms could be counted on one hand.
Maik would like to be in the newspaper with his last name, but he is afraid that future employers will not be as understanding as the youth care agency where he now works.
drug career
In 2015, when Leon Knoops was researching the rise of sex under the influence of crystal meth in the Netherlands, he first heard about ‘slamming’ from users. The report will be published this week Slamming in the Netherlands of Mainline, a foundation that deals with drugs and health. Knoops, who speaks to users and trains healthcare staff, is a co-author of the report, which paints a picture of a subculture in which sex and drugs are inextricably linked. In addition to gay men, this also includes men who call themselves straight or bi.
The most striking conclusions: slamming has become more accepted since 2015, the group of slammers is growing, it no longer takes place in isolated sex networks. It is being talked about more openly on dating apps and websites, and in the meantime popular slam drugs such as crystal meth and 3-MMC (also known as Meow) are readily available. Regular slamming can cause physical, mental and sexual complaints. This increases the number of users with health problems. While the care is hardly equipped for the complicated combination of sex, drugs and sometimes underlying traumas.
That’s the short story. Behind Mainline’s report are the life stories of men who may have once injected drugs at a sex party, were completely overwhelmed by the intense experience, wanted that rush again, and gradually indulged in it more and more often and for longer. Perhaps they also didn’t come loose, saw relationships crumble, their job lost, even their house. And an individual who saw no other way out than self-imposed death. Slamming does not have to become problematic, but it is possible: about one in five respondents lost control over its use at some point.
Also read: The rise of designer drug Poes: ‘Then the whole group started using it’
Mainline tried to get an idea of how slamming is developing in the Netherlands and how large the group is. But the phenomenon is not easy to quantify. “It is an invisible, hard-to-reach group, slamming takes place behind the front door,” says Knoops. Figures from different studies vary widely. Mainline maintains that 0.5 to 2 percent of men who have sex with men and do chemsex have experience with slamming. Knoops thinks that it concerns at least a thousand rather than hundreds of men in the Netherlands. “Five years ago I often had to explain what slamming is. Now only four of the more than a thousand profile holders we approached via a gay dating site asked: what is slamming?
Corona seems to have strengthened the trend, Knoops says. “Because men couldn’t go to festivals or clubs, there were more sex parties at home and men were quicker to look for a date directly online. You can sometimes see in their profile whether they are open to slamming or whether they want nothing to do with it.”
It is clear that the group of slammers has expanded in five years. “First we mainly saw people over 45, who used at exclusive parties and needed a lot of money for that, because crystal meth was much more expensive. Now we also speak to people in their twenties who have already stopped.” Nor is it something typically Randstad. “For example, we hear from South Holland and the border regions that there are also large slam sex networks in Antwerp, Brussels and Cologne.” There are also swingers (straight and bisexual couples who have sex with others) who have experience with slamming.
Addicted to sex parties: “It destroys you.”
It is not mainstream, injecting is a bridge too far for most. “But look at GHB: it emerged in the gay club scene in the mid-1990s, the link with sex was added, it seeped through to swingers and now it is a popular substance during sex for all walks of life.”
Knoops finds the new groups of slammers concerned about which Mainline receives signals, such as vulnerable sex workers and LGBT people, who have come to the Netherlands from unsafe countries and are going through a relatively fast drug career here.
Grindr and Romeo
When he was nineteen, Maik fell in love and moved to Brabant. Little house-tree-beast, he hoped. “But sex without slamming didn’t give that sense of belonging.” He soon returned to “chill parties” – group sex parties at people’s homes – through dating apps like Grindr and Romeo. “I mixed everything, crystal meth, coke, ketamine, GHB – anything that helped me get more and more into sex. I have sometimes set boundaries, but if someone did something against my will, I just let them go.”
Until it was no longer sustainable financially and in his relationship and he sought help. He hardly told the doctor anything. Mental health services only dealt with drugs. Only after coming to the emergency room for the third time, with a brain haemorrhage, did he end up in a ‘safe house’ where a counselor started talking about a ‘sex and love addiction’. “I attended meetings with drug addicts and meetings with sex addicts, but they didn’t get together. While I was very much ready for a place where I could tell my whole story. During my recovery period I got to know one boy who was in the same boat. He hanged himself. I myself sometimes thought: let it happen.”
Liberation
Slamming can provide an enormous sense of liberation, for example for men who have long felt sexually inhibited due to rejection of their orientation. But since 2015, a growing group of men with complaints have contacted Mainline. “They enjoyed chemsex for years but lost control when they switched to slamming, mainly because the post-injection rush and sexual boost are so intense.”
Slamming every weekend in sessions of twelve hours or longer, sometimes as many as ten slams, and then days of hangovers – that’s going to pay off if you have to go back to work every Monday. In addition to physical complaints such as bruises or broken veins, slamming can be accompanied by sadness, money worries and relationship problems. The emergence of 3-MMC is cited as a possible cause of the growing group of problem users: the rush is short, the craving is strong, and that leads to long slam sessions, where each shot can be a blow to the veins.
“Do I feel like sex and therefore want to use it, or do I want to use and do I therefore feel like sex – that is often indistinguishable,” says Knoops. “Some have never learned to enjoy gay sex in a positive way. Slamming releases all the brakes, after that it becomes difficult for them to have sex without drugs.” And that’s what makes treatment so difficult. “When men turn to addiction care, the focus is often on quitting drugs. The link with sex or underlying issues is rarely made. And in group therapy you are not going to share your sex experiences with people who are there just for a drug addiction.”
First, men must already feel safe to tell their story, without fear of judgment. GPs usually don’t even know what slamming is, and when men are referred, they often encounter a lack of knowledge. Knoops: “If you only stop the drugs, the need for sex will also rekindle the craving for drugs. To break through that, it is advisable to temporarily put your sex life on the back burner.” That realization alone sometimes makes the step insurmountable. “You have to let go of a whole world, even good friends. You are often all alone.”
What is needed, also according to the men in the study, is non-stigmatizing information for men who are curious and do not know how great the attraction and the risks of slamming are. Furthermore: cooperation between STI and HIV clinics and regular addiction care, and training of care providers about chemsex and slamming. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam, for example, there are already links in which field workers such as Knoops, GGD, GGZ, hospitals, addiction care and also the gay community work together.
Ritual
Maik has been clean for two and a half years now. “Of the drugs. Because that I am worth something, still has to be confirmed with anonymous sex, and then I prefer that the other person is under the influence. There is no healthy way for me.” In the meantime, he has seen the drugs enter his boring Brabant village. “And all you have to do is open Grindr for it to be offered.”
He lacks the free-spirited feeling he got from slamming. And most of all the preparatory actions, the ritual. “Sometimes I have to do blood tests in the hospital, I still go very well on that.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 19, 2021
#sex #drugs #longer #works