We’re celebrating 8 big years of GGT this year with a look back at some of the favourite stories we’ve published.
This week Ryan Farrell shares his top 20 benefits of party drugs!
A few months ago, my friend Glenn got stood up by a guy who was too high to call him. He got stood up again by someone who had taken partying a little too extreme and couldn’t handle a relationship with another person. That same month, a friend of mine was too stoned to leave his apartment and asked me if I could do his laundry for him because he was afraid he’d screw it up somehow. That same month, I asked a bartender at Byzantium to give me an idea for my column and the one concern he identified in the gay community was the drug culture. ‘It’s destroying the city,’ he said. ‘People aren’t going out anymore. They stay at home and get high. The gay scene has no night life. It has no life at all. It’s pathetic.’ Recently on a cottage getaway weekend, the concern of drug use came up and was discussed at a more international perspective as the use of drugs, specifically crystal meth, has damaged gay communities of New York City, San Francisco and Paris.
Now I have addressed the prolific use of drugs in Toronto’s gay community at great length in many of my articles. Yes, drugs present demise in the community (if we can call it that anymore). Yes, they prevent a sense of connectedness amongst homosexuals. Yes, they perpetuate alienation. None of this is news to us.
Inevitably, what comes into debate is the definition of addiction. Presumably, what most drug using fags believe is that they are not addicted to drugs because they do not have the need to do them. Fair enough. But on the flip side, there are those gay men who drop E, drink G, or snort K every weekend. Sure they don’t need it. And they’ve been able to exercise the most mundane of daily tasks in between their Saturday night excursions. Surely they can’t be addicted if they’re only reserving their drug expenditures to one night a week, right?
And you couldn’t be more right, faggots. I’m so tired of people giving drugs a bad name. Doctors, nurses …I went to a seminar given by a PhD from St. Mary’s University who was talking about the addictive nature of party drugs. PhD – what the hell do you know? A couple of years of research and you call yourself an expert. Has no one ever thought to think of the benefits? To exploit the positive things that drugs can do to gay men to help them explore themselves and be the best they can be? Ecstasy was, after all, first called Adam and used by psychiatrists to help their patients be less inhibited in talking about their feelings and experiences.
Many party drugs have similar benefits. To help identify some of the greater benefits of drugs, I have decided to list their top twenty benefits.
- Knitting takes on a whole new meaning.
- Your apartment has never been cleaner.
- Weight loss has never been easier!
- You can talk to anyone about anything.
- You can talk to the refrigerator about anything!
- Hallucinations have never been so life-like.
- Smoking doesn’t seem that arduous a task.
- Coffee? Who needs it?!
- You might keep repeating yourself, but that just helps you remember it next time.
- What’s wrong with a little challenge in the simplest of tasks?
- You might keep repeating yourself, but that just helps you remember it next time.
- You finally understand 2001: A Space Odyssey (or at least you would if it didn’t require so much damn concentration).
- Baking stuff that’s not supposed to go in the oven is really cool!
- Eating stuff that’s not supposed to be baked is really cool!
- You finally understand the meaning of … stuff!
- You can discover 101 unintended purposes for a dish towel.
- You can make art from stuff in your refrigerator.
- You might keep repeating yourself, but that just helps you remember it next time.
- Showering is SO MUCH FUN!
- Rearranging the furniture in your living room has never been so effortless.
