I did Tina, gay slang for crystal meth, for eight years. Not every day, though every day I wanted it so badly that I did other drugs to hold off the cravings. And when I did do it, once or twice a month, I’d be lost to the drug for usually three days at a time. Why? What’s so great about doing meth? Why are so many people — especially urban gay men — still risking their lives as I did?

Imagine a magic powder that transforms every potential lover into the person of your dreams. Now suppose every touch of that person feels like full-body orgasms for hours, and your hunger for them never ceases as long as you are under the spell. This powder also gives you the supernatural ability to block out every interfering thought about your job, or taking Billy to soccer practice, or paying rent. No more obsessing about your mortality or your lover’s, or about how your actions could possibly kill you. Nope. It’s just you, your hot partner, and sex for eternity. It’s not only the best sex you’ve ever had, it’s better than the best especially if combined with toys from a site like winkwinksextoys. It’s dark and kinky, and reveals your deepest, most secret fantasies. Fantasies you didn’t even know you had. It’s huge. It’s wet. It’s voracious. It’s Godzilla-fucks-Gamera sex! It is as desirable as the ring was to Gollum. All in all, it can be classified as one of the best gay sex toys ever. Now imagine all that and then multiply it by 100 and stretch it over three days.

That’s meth sex.

OK, sure, meth sex had a few drawbacks. Like when a sex partner (also on meth) hid under the bed because of the FBI camera he hallucinated was hiding in the TV set. Or the frequent instances where neither I nor my hyper-horny partner could get hard and had to find something like dildos instead. Or when the drug started to wind down, and, for the 100th time, I was surprised to discover I was no longer attracted to the aforementioned god-like partner whom I swore I was in love with five minutes before. And then, as I prayed that this now lizard-human-Antichrist would leave, he instead kept pulling incessantly on his flaccid little buddy, stammering, “Just five more minutes and I can come! Just give me five more minutes!” for five hours.

But still, meth sex, at least when I first started having it, was the best sex ever.

So, despite the suicidal depression that always followed, despite the job losses, the inability to maintain any kind of relationship, the questions by dentists about my teeth-grinding, and the fact that, to be honest, it never was quite as good as that first time, I kept chasing that initial experience of the most-amazing-sex-I-ever-had. But then, toward the end of my using, the space between the first bump of the night and the suicidal depression grew dramatically shorter. Even when I was high I was low. Something had to change. The best-sex-I-ever-had thing became just a label on the packaging — its promise as truthful as a Sea-Monkeys advertisement in the back of a comic book.