Don't miss this riveting piece by Tony Valenzuela in the L.A. Times about gay men and crystal meth. An HIV-positive man who's pretty much done it all and lived to tell the sometimes frightful, sometimes troublingly thrilling tale, Valenzuela dramatically and thoughtfully expands the context of why talking about how to kick the habit isn't enough:

But it is worth noting that in the gay community, the sky is always falling—because it did once, because we fear it might again, and so we shouldn’t be shocked when an alarming number of us respond to endemic fatalism by practicing nihilism by rote.

One doesn’t have to have a problem with drugs or be infected with HIV to feel the painful legacy of AIDS or to know the slow suffocation of homophobia. These cataclysms reside beneath the surface of our skins and come up as boils every time another state writes anti-gay discrimination into its constitution, another school board erases us from textbooks, or more parents teach their children to revile us. The future of drug addiction is all but guaranteed in a population of gay kids growing up in today’s savagely anti-gay, Constitution-hating age of hyperbole.