Sorry, late coming to this thread, but I had to comment on the following outrageous quote by Pandolf:

- Anyway Bill I have used crystal a number of times, just not in many, many years. I took it most weekends for a summer and occassionally after that, as did many of my friends. I never got addicted. I never attended a meth orgy. I never fucked a dog. I listened to tribal house both before, after and still today, and don’t think crystal has had anything to do with it. -

Well aren't you the lucky one, Pandolf? I have lost two friends who committed suicide through their addiction to crystal - one was a British porn actor for a well-known U.S. label, the other a New Yorker - and I can tell you some horror stories about this drug that would make your blood turn cold. If anything www.lifeormeth.com only skims the surface of the 'devil's drug', though that is not to take away from its unrivalled efforts at empowering users to take back their lives, as many recount on the site itself.
So, Pandolf, a number of fortunate souls, yourself included, are able to ride crystal without the horrendous crash? Well aren't you the lucky ones? But doesn't this say heaps for how downright contemptible, selfish, unconscionable and risible your 'I'm all right Jack, sod the next guy!' attitude makes you? Maybe that is par for the course where you come from, but I can only imagine it must be an utterly dark, dark place if you really think crystal addiction is no big deal.
You also claim most gay men having sex use cocaine? Where is your scientific evidence, as you yourself demand? Most men I know avoid coke where sex is concerned for obvious reasons. And how on earth can revealing the potential effects of crystal addiction stigmatise users and drive them further underground? That is the same loopy excuse the HIV charities (where you so clearly would be at home) use to avoid educating about the nasty effects of HIV, so as not to upset those with the virus. Great, so let's either glam crystal up then just like they do in the HIV campaigns or better still do nothing and hope it goes away.
Boy, Pandolf, you were born 60 years too late and in the wrong country, and I don't need to spell out which one I am referring to either.

Thumbs up Lifeormeth. You were there for me when I was getting knee high in the meth shit when it was openly being sold and smoked in Waterloos well known sauna. I may even owe my life to the wake up call your great info provided. Dunno what shit your friend Pandolf is smoking but hes def seriously delooded and a little parannoyed. Peace x

Far more damage than Gaydar, Pandolf, who you profess to supporting? Notwithstanding their negligence where a minority of their reckless members are concerned who openly solicit others via their profiles into "bug-chasing", "seeding" and the kinds of hard drug-fuelled behaviours that are scientifically proven to be highly correlated to HIV infection? I think this speaks volumes for your moral compass, Pandolf. And to be totally frank here, the sort of person who can also vainly fight the corner of the GMFA, whose ineffective and incentivising HIV campaigns have demonstrably driven the HIV rate upwards, is not the sort of person I would want to also be advocating my site's work. You are a minority voice on this forum, Pandolf, as indeed you are over at the Disco Damage debate around GMFA's latest tawdry HIV campaign. Nuff said, so here is where I exit this debate, though no doubt Pandolf will have to have the last word, and just to humour him here it is...

Well Gary I dispute your statistics. I imagine you've had some sort of online poll on your site that maybe garnered a few hundred responses and you've extrapolated this data across the entire number of visitors to your site since 2002. That is not science.

It seems unlikely that nearly half the visitors to your site are crystal users (724,980), and far, far more unlikely that more than 2/3's of those crystal users (195,745 + 246,493) were inspired to want to quit or quit altogether by your site... ! That's ridiculous, and would mean that your website is far more effective than any crystal treatment, detox or rehab program out there anywhere in the world!

I don't deny that you have good intentions and no, I can't say I'm planning on leaving any altruistic legacy of this sort behind. I'd contend, though, that your legacy is one of misinformation and deceit. I do think that you are genuinely misguided. I firmly support Gaydar's refusal to link to your site because I think your website does far more damage than good.

Correction:

Number of meth users this site has inspired to want to quit using (according to online surveys as of 25/8/9): 195,745

Number of meth users this site has empowered to quit using altogether:
246,493.

I have no intention of expending valuable energy rising to Pandolf's bait. I will just let Life or Meth's site stats speak for themselves:

Total visitors since November 2002 (as of 25/8/9):
1,686,000
Total UK-based visitors since November 2002:
252,900
Total visitors for rest of Europe since November 2002:
185,460
Number of meth users visiting since November 2002:
724,980
Number of meth users this site has inspired to want to quit using (as of 25/8/9): 455,220
Number of meth users this site has empowered to quit using altogether:
573,240.

Duh, I guess selling my home was ultimately a no-brainer...

As I say, Pandolf, what legacy will you leave behind? "He wasted his years lurking on message boards to smear and discredit the efforts of others who put their lives to more meaningful use, all the while behind a ridiculous-sounding pseudonym..." Yeah, I'm sure that's something your mother would be mighty proud of, P... ;-)

Oh I've heard people talk about it, Paul, just never come across it in all my countless visits to clubs in Vauxhall and elsewhere. Like I say, GHB, ketamine and cocaine are everywhere, but not crystal.

Anyway Bill I have used crystal a number of times, just not in many, many years. I took it most weekends for a summer and occassionally after that, as did many of my friends. I never got addicted. I never attended a meth orgy. I never fucked a dog. I listened to tribal house both before, after and still today, and don't think crystal has had anything to do with it.

I've espoused these views for a long time on discodamaged (just ask Paul) and have absolutely no affiliation with any gay health charity. I do however strongly feel that the charities are getting a bad wrap for using evidence-backed harm reduction techniques rather than baseless, totalitarian, war-on-drugs style tactics. I firmly believe that zero tolerance approaches to drug use are ineffective, and the recent Theroux documentary on Fresno's crystal problem is good evidence of that. In fact most of America is a good example of that.

I am from North America and have seen first hand that alarmist, zero tolerance approaches to drug abuse don't work. I have been impressed that Britain has not gone done this same path, and am dismayed to see that some people continue to think that this is the only option given the vast array of evidence from across the pond suggesting otherwise.

When I hear people saying things like "the campaigns aren't scary enough," "the penalties aren't stiff enough," etc it worries me greatly. It makes me think of America's failed war on drugs. It makes me think of all the addicts who end up lost and marginalised because of a stigma attached to a drug that goes beyond all reason. Intelligent people will see past such propaganda and perhaps end up using or abusing a substance. Less intelligent people will buy into the propaganda and refuse them help when they most need it.

As someone who has been been through meth addiction i can certainly vouch for Life or Meth as an essential tool. People should go on the site and view the tesimoneals, which speak for themselves.

I got in with a regular crowd in London who held meth orgies each weekend and recruted guys on Gaydar, Manhunt, etc. The tacticks they used to get guys on to crystal were inhuman, but I guess that is what the drug makes you.

Pandolf is entitled to hold his views I suppose, but I wander what makes him an authority on what resorse works and what doesnt when he claims never to have used crystal before? I guess I got my answer when I logged into Disco Damage today and saw he had made a comment there also which suggests he has an agenda at play:

"I totally disagree with what you're saying, Rob & diskoboi. The GMFA campaign is one that is backed up by facts and statistics, and one that resounds more with young people than the kind of alarmist, sensationalised campaign that you're suggesting."

For uninformed homovision readers, There Pandolf is commenting on a new hiv campaign depicting a prat with a kitchen strainer on his head which is supposed to be able to detect hiv. Seems our friend Pandolf is allied to the workings of the HIV orgs and hence why he is slagging off independant resources that actually help people while brown-nosing orgs that have miserably failed us.

How transparant can you get I ask you........

gary, i wouldn't worry about the relevance of someone's opinion who claims he's never ever seen or heard of crystal being used anywhere in london... seems rather silly.

We clearly hang out in different circles, Paul, as in all my time spent clubbing (frequently) in London I have not once come across crystal. Absolutely heaps of G, ketamine and cocaine, but never crystal.

Gary-- please lets get a little more scientific about this. An STI clinician? Where's the evidence? What is a "worrying number?" Do we have even a single example of a gay crystal user OD'ing at a London venue? How about a gay crystal user dying period?

Your efforts at stigmatising crystal use serve only to alienate users and make them harder to reach. Furthermore, you create this stigma through inciting a totally bizarre kind of hysteria, equating tribal house music with crystal and sex addiciton and even going so far as to suggest the London-style funky house of music yesteryear could save america from the clutches of crystal. In other sections you suggest crystal use may lead to acts of bestiality.

It is absolutely, positively ludicrious. I don't deny that crystal can be dangerous but your represenation of crystal is so bizarre as to be laughable. It destroys your credibility and doesn't act as a deterent, much in the same way that suggesting smoking pot could kill you doesn't deter young people from smoking it.. they simply don't believe it!

I think it's great that you feel the need to make the world a better place but I think you need to do it in a more productive way, doing so without resorting to sensationalised and alarmist techniques and by focusing on more critical issues. The outlandish rhetoric of your crystal site needs to be toned down and perhaps you could consider addressing some of the more pressing substances currently available on the scene (though not in the same way as at lifeormeth!)

"A central London frontline STI clinician then informed Gaydar that, contrary to the deception being spun by the so-called gay men’s sexual health charities, worrying numbers of seroconverting MSM (men who have sex with men) were citing meth as a prime factor. "

Say what you will, Pandolf, but I act on the evidence as I witness it and as it is presented to me, whether anecdotal, scientific or whatever. I certainly would not have sold my home in Brick Lane and devoted five years of my life to my campaign otherwise. I worked with the Met police for two of those years, and they attribute my co-operation with getting crystal meth reclassified from a class B to class A drug, and furthermore, while it may never be proven, have attributed my efforts at stigmatising crystal meth before it could take hold here as having prevented larger-scale use in the UK and Europe than we have fortunately witnessed.

Tell me, Pandolf, what have you done, to try and make this world a better place for all to live it?

odd. every time i've gone out clubbing, crystal's been all over the place. it's true that 4 or 5 years ago, there wasn't much crystal use in clubs, but that's clearly changed and anyone who doesn't have an agenda openly admits that. g and tina go together and all one has to do is wait until 4 or so in the morning to see the bug-eyed gurners in force in any london club - either closing it down as they lurch about and grab each other crotches or fuck in toilets or starting up yet another club session at some after-hours or at one of london's many saunas where crystal is openly used.

everyone who's been out in vauxhall knows this is true and denying those simple facts does nobody any good.

I couldn't agree more with Gaydar's refusal to carry banner ads promoting lifeormeth.com. lifeormeth.com is frankly one of the most bizarre, alarmist and inaccurate drug resources I have ever seen in my life and the thought of it receiving any more exposure than it already has frightens me deeply. It is not a carefully balanced resource, but rather a scare-mongering, tabloid-esque site about a problem that barely exists in the UK.

Anyone who goes out clubbing in London knows that crystal is practically non-exstent and there are other substances being used that require much more attention by health resources. Anyone who frequents Gaydar's chat rooms knows that the vast majority of people requesting PNP are doing so within the context of cocaine use. Gary L's out-dated stats from the US really don't have any bearing on the current state of the scene in the UK.

Well done Gaydar, GMFA and THT for refusing to give in to Gary Leigh and his self-aggrandizing campaign against crystal.

For anyone who wishes to reply to my comment, please be less-predictable than suggesting I am a crystal user. I am not.

This is a quote Simon Johnston gave several years ago before climbing on board the Gaydar corporate bandwagon:

"Prevention and support is needed, and it needs to be directed at gay youth... I don't remember the scary adverts, and maybe something like that is needed as a wake-up call to young gay men so they get the message."

Now that he is allied to the two main London HIV charities that fiercely resist the deafening community call for the kind of scary adverts he feels - or at least felt - were needed to wake-up gay youth about the perils of acquiring HIV, doesn't that make him something of a hypocrite?

How ironic to find Simon Johnson speaking for Gaydar these days. What a long way he has come since creating the Puffta resource which once acted as a protective voice for gay youth, until selling up to Prowler who have used it ever since to exploit young gays' money and health.
Now we are supposed to believe his big corporate voice is sincere when he claims that Gaydar has a social conscience, and cites some token gestures to validate that claim. Well, where was my response when I alerted Gaydar of a profile that invited me to a weekend-long "had drugs binge party" in London where all entrants were promised a "slammer" of meth on entering? There wasn't one, yet you were fast enough to demand that a friend move all mention of the room he had to let on his profile - either that or spend £40 on a commercial ad or be delisted!
Simon, your words ring as hollow and transparent as any right-minded person would expect from a corporate head launching a damage limitation offensive to preserve your company's wholesome image and shareholders' profits - that is where your prioroties lie, not with your members' health and well being. Gaydar no better than all the other enterprises that have emerged in recent years to jump on the degradation and debasement of gay culture bandwagon that feeds on gay men's weaknesses and addictions.
In that respect Gaydar is no different to the saunas, sex-on-site clubs, bareback video producers...who all take our money and run, with little or no regard to the consequences the reckless use of your services by an element of gay men leave behind. So long as out of sight, out of mind your consciences are somehow clear.
But please don't try to make out your company has a social conscience; if it did it would be doing a dam site more to raise social awareness about the many hazards that your site publicizes via its members profiles yet does little or nothing to address.
Tell me matey, how do you sleep at night?

For the record, following the meeting in February 2007 I made regular but increasingly frustrating calls to Gaydar's Client Services Manager Paul Trickey, who co-ordinated the February 2007 meeting, to keep updated on progress with THT's answer to the growing meth problem within the "partying" sub-section of London's gay scene, since they assured it would be launched in the summer of 2007.

As I say in my account of the meeting, a generic web site was not in my opinion an adequate or realistic response, as the American and Australian experiences have revealed Crystal meth to be a drug like no other in its propensity for lowering inhibitions and inducing HIV infection, hence why across America there are, quite literally, dozens of Crystal Meth Anonymous meetings weekly (and when did you ever hear of an Ecstasy Anonymous or a Ketamine Anonymous meeting?). I am sure anyone who saw Louis Theroux's recent BBC2 documentary about the Californian town blighted by meth will have gained an idea of what gay ghettoes in cities like San Francisco and New York resembled at the peak of their meth epidemics several years ago...

Frankly, by the time of my last contact with Gaydar in January 2008, I had grown weary and fed up of all the excuses as to why THT/GMFA had not delivered their proposed web site on schedule (the grinding bureaucracy endemic in such organisations often ensures programmes such as these take months, even years, to materialise, often too late to fulfill the objective they were designed for in the first place).

Quite simply they had not kept to their part of the agreement, and I was not going to wait any longer for what I knew would be - as with most of their campaigns - a generic, PC harm reduction (i.e. harm enabling) A/Z web site which dilutes and glamorises the subject matter rather than serving to discourage health-endangering behaviour. In my opinion both Gaydar and THT had reneged on their promise to deliver.

Sure enough, when it finally appeared Drugf@cked was heavily criticised for its trivialising and incentiving, rather than straightforward and truthful, approach. And would I still have been involved with the design of a crystal meth banner knowing it would be linked to something so crass and deceitful as Drugf@cked? No bloody way!!! (Can anyone at the THT please explain why adverts for Drugf@cked are currently being funded in the gay press by the Pan London HIV Prevention Programme; the £2 million-plus, three-year contract awarded to THT last year to provide HIV prevention campaigns to London up to 2011? They might also care to explain why they are using these funds to promote THT's HIV support services to those already infected with HIV in Positive Nation magazine. These funds were, after all, provided for HIV PREVENTION PROGRAMMES!!!.)

But I applaud Gaydar for their support of the gay community in other ways and for their AIDS fundraising efforts for the National AIDS Trust, an organisation that is far more flexible, open and forward-thinking than either the THT or GMFA. However, regarding Gaydar's use of THT personnel to dispense advice on HIV/Aids to its members, perhaps Simon would care to read my parallel article currently running on Pink News titled 'Killing Us Softly' (http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-13...) which levels the blame for the appalling failures in HIV prevention over the last 10 years squarely on the shoulders of these organisations. If they are at the core of the HIV epidemic problem as I believe they are, how are they supposed to impart solutions and useful information that is not culled from the same PC ideology which all THT/GMFA workers are programmed and, in effect, mind-controlled by?

In perceiving THT and the GMFA as the guardians and saviours of our community's health and well being, Gaydar is merely perpetuating the problems I believe these agencies have created. Just because they are government-sanctioned channels does not mean THT and GMFA are the rightful arbiters on gay men's health; it merely means they are following the same Government diktats and directives that have destroyed countless other once strong and effective institutions via the doctrine of political correctness, which turns truth on its head and which yields dishonest and dangerous responses to tackling social problems, as any HIV campaign over the last decade demonstrates all too clearly.

Perhaps Gaydar should stop closing ranks with its fellow gay power/elite organisations in order to protect its vested interests and instead pay more attention to the content of some of its members' profiles for an idea of how our sexual health charities have, by stealth, created an environment in which phrases like "f@ck me raw", "seed me", "bug chaser seeks donor", "party and play" and "meth me up" have become common currency. Then, perhaps, Gaydar could start helping to catalyse the change needed at this time to ensure that the up and coming generation of gay men who will number many of their members are not in turn sleepwalked into a terminal illness and a life of toxic meds and chronic illness...

In response to Gary Leigh’s ‘Gaydar, Meth and Sexual Health Failures’ published 14th August 2009, QSoft Consulting Ltd, owners of the Gaydar brand would like to add the following;

We can confirm that during a meeting meeting with Gary Leigh, THT and GMFA it was agreed by all parties that Gaydar.co.uk would carry the THT’s Drug Fucked Campaign after which time we agreed to carry Life or Meth’s own creative that would be developed by Gary and our in-house creative department on the condition the banner would link to the THT’s Drug Fucked web site and not the Life or Meth web site.

It is our policy to ensure information and advice given to Gaydar members covering sexual health, alcohol and substance abuse and other social issues is distributed by professional accredited sources. To date Gary has not been in contact with us to discuss the creative mentioned above and we would welcome him getting in touch with us to discuss a way forward.

Gaydar is committed first and foremost to supporting the gay and lesbian community that originally created and continues to support its success. Over the past 12 months in particular, we have used our portfolio of online (Gaydar) and broadcast media (GaydarRadio) platforms to the benefit of the gay and lesbian community, which forms the core of our users and our audience. Most recently we distributed 160,000 condoms in Central London on behalf of the NHS, a street team has also been put together to clean up discarded condoms at popular cruising grounds. £3000 was raised for the National AIDS Trust and Gaydar has supported the charity financially to provide relevant information to Gay and Bisexual men through the NAT web site while GaydarRadio has committed considerable commercial airtime to World AIDS Day activities.

The THT Net Reach rooms offer group and one on one counselling services. We know Gay men are more likely to talk openly and seek advice online, and this service helps facilitate just that. Gay media owners are without doubt playing a significant part in raising awareness of important community issues such as HIV prevention, drug abuse and homophobic crime. But we need to work more closely as a society in general to identify new channels and develop new approaches to ensure that young people especially are not allowed to forget the risks that they face be they from unprotected sex, the use of recreational drugs or homophobic crime.

Congrats on your great campaigning around crystal meth! I have seen it destroy many lives in London yet it isn't talked about although we know it is going on even as the supposed sexual health charities sit idly back and indulge the community in its hard drug use via resources like drugf*cked. I know several who have converted to positive under meth's influence, and a city lawyer for a top law firm in the City who is now reduced to signing on, when he can muster the energy to do so that is. I also know many others who sought out your information on what this drug is really about and it prevented them going down the same path.
So please continue to get the truth out about these threats that are unique to our community's health yet which are being ignored by those funded to prevent them in the first place, and as the saying goes - "don't let the b*st*rds in gay men's sexual health get you down."
More power to you!

Thanks for these comments guys, and to Simon for publishing my account of that somewhat unforgettable - though for all the wrong reasons - day. Afraid to say this is exactly what occurred at Gaydar HQ. I had Cass Mann from the longest-running gay men's health charity, Positively Healthy, along with me for support, which is just as well as I felt like I was being set up to be ambushed by the HIV sector's attack dogs.

By the way, I have an article detailing some of the HIV sector's devastating failures up on Pink News at the moment. Please check it out - the intention is to get a debate going to halt the dangerous decision making within these organisations which is leading a whole new generation of gay youngsters into acquiring HIV:

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-13...

Gaydar has a social duty to provide links to health education resources to their members, particularly about dangerous new drugs like crystal meth that are prolifically being touted on members' profiles. I dare say there are more than a few men who were offered this substance by others they met through Gaydar and took it willingly not knowing it is the hard drug most related to HIV conversion. If what the author of this story says is true then it is truly shocking. We expect no less in the behaviour displayed by the likes of the HIV charities who have betrayed our community so abysmally, but that the likes of Gaydar are co-conspirators behind their resistance to safe-guarding Gaydar members' well being is truly shocking. I will take my patronage to Manhunt.net in future, which has a consistent track record in providing links to informative resources on major health risks like crystal meth.