join the resistance

so the question is, can we as a community, or a queer nation, as it were, begin to have conversations around what we believe to be healthy? is it okay for some of us to hate watching our brothers spin out on tweak and not say anything? and is it okay to say something if we hate it? can we allow ourselves the space to have our concerns and express them? and can we allow you to have your space while we really don't like what you do? i don't know the answers to this. in a perfect world, i would think yes. but what is our true nature? i wonder if we know more than we give ourselves credit for and we can do more, much more, than we conceive.

in boston and in san francisco, the newest campaign to reduce the meth damage is to enlist ourselves to educate and promote thoughtful decision making. will this take us to a place of more understanding? or will it become more divisive?

from bay windows of boston:

Last month Fenway Community Health's New Champions, a federally funded program working to combat crystal meth addiction, launched its second major phase, debuting its Resist Meth ad campaign and holding its second training for men to learn how to do outreach in the community and talk about meth use and addiction. New Champions, a collaboration between Fenway, AIDS Action Committee, and the Latin American Health Institute, is one of 10 programs around the country receiving crystal meth prevention money from a grant through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSA), but among those programs it is the only one focused on confronting meth addiction within the gay male community.
Jed Barnum, program manager for New Champions, said the other programs receiving the SAMSA meth grant focus on other populations such as children, youth in the juvenile justice system and Native Americans. The program managers share information through conference calls and meet at conferences held twice each year, and Barnum said the New Champions program has been able to provide those other programs with a new perspective because of the unique patterns of meth addiction in the gay male community. He said representing a gay-focused program has allowed him to advocate for a focus on the links between sex and meth use in the programs' approach to tracking meth use.

"It's allowed us to advocate for questions around sexual behavior that might be tricky to do in other cases," said Barnum.

for the rest of the article click here.




and it seems as if san francisco is following suit:

I don't touch meth but know where to get it. It seems that Castro Street
in San Francisco is awash in the crystalline powder, with every twink in
town all tweaked out on it and engaging in wild sex orgies and spreading
HIV. So the self-proclaimed LBGTFHZ leadership has decreed that this is
a community crisis and has begun a propaganda campaign to re-educate the
twinked-out masses to resist crystal meth.

There were "Resist Meth" posters everywhere, with an image reminiscent of
a 1950s-era Soviet propaganda poster depicting a worker promoting the
the socialist revolution, and the inspiring slogan "resist meth" that is
sure to re-educate the proles. There was another propaganda poster
depicting some sort of crystal meth board game, and a headline in the gay
Bay Area Reporter rag that declared that crystal meth use has "plateued"
and that the re-education campaign should start to reduce use soon.


BTW, on the train home yesterday there was someone who appeared to be on
crystal meth, though not obviously gay. He just kept walking back and
forth through the cars with a dazed look on his face and he didn't look
like a disheveled homeless person (yet), so I assumed he was on meth.