More than a quarter of LGBTQ people lost someone to drugs

Graeme Smith writes: New community-led research finds that 28 per cent of LGBTQ+ drug users surveyed in London have lost at least one loved one to a drug-related death in the past five years. I am one of them, and this is the story I spent eleven years not telling.

There is a particular kind of statistic that stops being a statistic the moment you read it, because you can put a name and a face and a last text message to it, and the number in the new research from You Are Loved CIC, shared exclusively with Attitude this week, is one of those.

Of 1,156 LGBTQ+ people surveyed who had used at least one recreational drug in the previous twelve months, 28 per cent said they had lost at least one loved one to a drug-related death in the last five years. In Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, the three boroughs that carry a good deal of queer London on their backs, that figure rises to a third.

Read that again slowly, because the report is not describing a distant epidemiological curve or a problem belonging to some other community somewhere else. It is describing your group chat. It is describing the people you danced with last summer. A third of respondents in parts of south London have buried someone, and the rest of us are simply waiting our turn to find out which friend it will be.

Mine was called Darren Williams. He was 35 years old.

What the research actually found

The report, Drug Use, Chemsex and Harm in London's LGBTQ+ Community: A Community-Led Evidence Report (2026), was produced by You Are Loved CIC and is the sort of work that ought to land on a minister's desk rather than simply circulating among the people who already know.

Of the 1,156 respondents, 560 reported using at least one of the three drugs most closely associated with chemsex, namely GHB or GBL, crystal meth and mephedrone. Those who used at least one of the three were almost three times more likely to describe their own recreational drug use as harmful than people using other substances, which is the kind of finding that sounds obvious until you notice how rarely services are funded as though it were true.

The detail that has stayed with me since I first read it concerns unconsciousness. Two thirds of people using GHB or GBL said they had passed out or fallen asleep involuntarily while using it, and the report is unambiguous that these episodes are overdoses, whatever the room calls them at the time. The researchers warn that the sheer frequency of it may have turned an overdose into a normal feature of a night out, something to be filmed, or laughed about the next morning, or quietly stepped around while the music carries on.

Crystal meth carried the highest harm profile in the survey, with almost 60 per cent of people using it reporting some level of concern, one in five describing their use as a big problem, and 41 per cent saying they used it at home on their own, which is a lonelier picture than the club-and-party imagery the subject usually attracts. Mephedrone came out lowest of the three, although 44 per cent still reported some level of concern, and its use was far more social, with 69 per cent using it in clubs and 35 per cent in bars.

Half of the people using GHB or GBL said they had some level of concern about their use. Half. That is not a fringe of people in crisis, it is a coin toss.

The word that stops people asking for help

Perhaps the most quietly devastating finding in the whole report is about language rather than pharmacology.

Almost a third of the people using those three drugs would not describe what they were doing as chemsex. Some 33.7 per cent said they would always use the word, 35.5 per cent said they would sometimes, and the rest would not use it at all. Among people who considered their drug use a big problem, 70 per cent said they would always describe it as chemsex, compared with just 22 per cent of those who did not consider their use problematic.

What that means in practice is that a service advertising chemsex support is speaking fluently to people already in trouble and saying almost nothing to the people heading there. Marc Svensson, founder and director of You Are Loved CIC, put it plainly when he said that the three drugs are not interchangeable, that GHB, GBL and crystal meth are causing the most harm, and that a third of respondents are telling us chemsex is not a word they use about themselves. Both of those things, he argues, have to shape how support is designed.

He is right, and I would go further. The word arrives with a whole climate of shame attached to it, and shame is the single most reliable mechanism for keeping a man out of a room where somebody might help him.

The report's authors are careful about its limits, noting that the survey was self-selected and that respondents were predominantly gay men at 87 per cent, cisgender men at 91 per cent and white at 80 per cent, so it should not be read as a population-level estimate for all LGBTQ+ people or for every queer Londoner. That caution is correct and it does not blunt the point. Within the group that answered, more than one in four has lost somebody.

February 2015

Darren was my fiancé for the better part of a decade, and by the night he died we were no longer together, which is a detail that grief does absolutely nothing with. Ten years of a life does not reorganise itself neatly around the word "ex".

He went out in London in February 2015. He was healthy, he was 35, he was at a party with friends, and he did not come home. The circumstances have never made sense to me and I have long since stopped waiting for the moment when they will, because there is no version of the arithmetic where a healthy man of 35 goes to a party and simply stops existing, and yet that is exactly what happened, and it happens somewhere in this city with a regularity that the new research has now put a number against.

What I remember most clearly is not the shock, which was total, but the bureaucracy of it, the phone calls and the practicalities and the strange administrative afterlife of a person, and then the way his death spread outwards through everybody who had loved him and took pieces out of all of them. It tore apart lives that were nowhere near that room. It is still doing it.

For eleven years I did not talk about any of this publicly. I have spent my working life putting a microphone in front of other people and asking them to be honest about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and I had a rule, unwritten and entirely self-serving, that the arrangement only ran in one direction.

The Chapman-Baker Unit, 2012

Three years before Darren died, I was in rehab.

Not the discreet private clinic with the grounds and the equine therapy that celebrities check into and then write a book about, but the Chapman-Baker Unit, a mental health trust specialist detox ward in north Manchester, the sort of place that takes people straight off a prison wing and dries them out. By the time I got there I had lost my job, my home, my mind and every last scrap of the self worth that had been holding the performance together.

Partway through that stay I attempted suicide. What followed was the standard response of any ward that has just had a very bad night, which is that they take everything away from you. Every possession, every fastening, right down to the laces in my shoes. You are left with nothing at all, and there is a strange and unrepeatable clarity in that, because when a person has been stripped of absolutely everything, the only thing left to build with is the person.

That is where I was remade. Slowly, unglamorously, in a place with strip lighting and terrible tea, among men the rest of the country had written off entirely, I put the pieces back in an order that held. I owe that unit my life in the most literal sense available.

So when I read that 41 per cent of people using crystal meth in this survey are doing it at home on their own, I am not reading about strangers. I know what that flat looks like. I know what time of day it is in there.

Why I have finally said it out loud

In late 2023 I sat down with Samantha Baines, host of The Divorce Social and a familiar voice and face from BBC Radio London, The One Show, The Crown and Call The Midwife, and I let her do to me what I have done to almost two hundred other people.

After nearly four years and 130 episodes of Outcast World, the mic finally turned towards its own creator, and the resulting conversation is the most difficult thing I have ever released. It covers Darren, it covers the ward, it covers addiction and the long unspectacular business of starting again, and it is available now as episode 131.

I am not offering it as a redemption arc, because I do not think grief resolves and I do not think recovery is a story with a final act. I am offering it because the new research says that more than a quarter of us are carrying a version of this, mostly in silence, mostly in the belief that we are the only one in the room who is, and that belief is doing real damage on top of the damage already done.

The people who commissioned this report are asking for services designed around what people actually say about themselves rather than around a vocabulary that makes funding applications legible. The people in the 28 per cent are asking for something smaller and harder, which is simply to be allowed to say a name out loud without the conversation stopping.

Darren Williams. He was 35. He was healthy. He went to a party with his friends.