Gay Community and Sexual Revolution
TV star Chad Allen (Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman), is now 30 and single. He’s been out publicly since 2001, and has been a recovering crystal meth addict for four and a half years. He engaged the audience with his tale: “I was 23 years old, after 10 top TV shows, alone in my house in Malibu, pacing the floor with a handgun believing that there were people in the trees outside waiting to get me.”
“That’s what all the glamour in Hollywood and all the amazing opportunity became: me by myself with a gun, and deciding whether I should live or die,” Allen related.
“This thing had made me feel so good, at a time when my parents couldn’t look me in the eye, my church didn’t love me, and the network executives wanted to make decisions about my sexuality and wanted me to have a girlfriend… When it turned on me I didn’t know what to do,” Allen concluded.
“They promise you that when you are sober you will have absolute freedom, and that is true. I go to parties and if I want to dance all night long I do, and I do it as a free person without something owning me,” Allen explained.
Dr. Gary Cohen, a Beverly Hills physician, has served over 2,000 patients with HIV, and is a nationally published author on HIV/AIDS wasting syndrome and Lipodystrophy. He told the audience he was 23 when he started in the medical profession specializing in HIV/AIDS. “In the 1980s I was holding people’s hands as they died, then with the miracle in ’96 with the protease inhibitors, it made me think that only my generation was going to get hit by this.”
“I would see a basal rate of one HIV positive case every month, then I started seeing one a week, then a couple per week, and it was all in the context of crystal meth use,” Cohen noted.
“Crystal meth is a sexual disinihibitor, it affects erectile function, so it makes bottoms out of tops. It affects the immune system and the CD8 Suppressor Cells, drops T-Cells and increases viral load. It trashes brain cells, neurons and the chemicals needed for brain function, and cognitive thinking,” Dr. Cohen explained.
“HIV positive people on medication have difficulty with their drug adherence schedules, many of which have half-lifes of only one to two days before they become ineffective or the HIV virus becomes resistive,” Dr. Cohen warned.
“In the 1980s we were in the midst of a gay sexual revolution, and introduced in that was a fatal sexually transmitted disease called AIDS. Here we are 20 + years later, we have introduced a very human addictive destroying drug,” Dr. Cohen noted.
“Social normative modeling makes things cool to do, or un-cool. People may brand you as a radical right-wing anti-drug person for being anti-Crystal, but who cares. It is the right thing to be. I lost my best friend to Crystal. He’s still alive, but he’s just a shell of his former self,” Dr. Cohen said.
