After having experienced serious problems with chems myself for years, suffering from severe GHB dependency in different periods of my life, and after having used Tina and many other substances on a daily basis for a long time, I have been working tirelessly since 2008 supporting men who are struggling with Chemsex, presenting with issues such as isolation, trauma, homophobia, very low self esteem, experiencing serious difficulties with engaging in sex sober or experiencing any kind of intimacy, HIV issues, etc. I can’t deny that I struggled with many of these issues myself in the past because of my drug use, and that is why I can say out loud that there is life after chemsex, and happiness is also an option.
For all these years I have been working very passionatelyin the finest services in the UK that offers Chemsex support, such as Antidote, Club Drug Clinic, Turning Point and since 2011 I have been a Chemsex specialist advisor at 56 Dean Street Sexual Health Clinic. I have seen between 12-15 people a week for years, which makes thousands of them in my whole career, providing brief interventions as well as more structured support in order to help them to take the control back over their chems use.
In 2019, as an activist, I started to provide chemsex support on Grindr and Scruff in London, and the response was so huge that very soon it was clear that there was a very urgent need to professionalise this kind of support that nobody else was providing before. Those are the platforms where so many people contact with one another who are looking for chemsex, and it was basic to start to operate there. Additionally, many people were reporting that the paranoia that they were experiencing because of their drug use was preventing them from contacting traditional chemsex support, as well as big fear of people knowing about it because of the stigma, which highlighted the need of being able to offer an option to get help anonymously. That is why we only work online, which has been extremely useful since the coronavirus appeared, and why, together with other professionals, we created Controlling Chemsex. I am very proud of my journey, I am who I am because I was who I was and I did what I did, and precisely because of all that, today there is a service that is bringing hope and highly effective chemsex support to so many people who are in a situation where is impossible to believe that some of the best days of their lives haven’t happened yet.
You can email Ignacio at:
