Peter Erik Lopez

Crystal meth releases dopamine into your system. You feel amazing. And the high lasts for hours. If you take it long enough, your brain stops producing dopamine. So, once you get off it, you can’t be happy. It can take up to two years for your system to level out. The withdrawals are vicious: a couple of days of deep depression and then about a week of sleeping around the clock. In the gay community, meth is widely used as a sex drug to enhance the pleasure and release inhibitions. Once off the drug, non-meth sex is dull and unstimulating. Sex is a large part of the gay community (for many, sex is a large part of being gay). So, the inability to have good sex is what usually drives users who are trying to get off meth run right back to it.

How could you live happily on Earth when you’ve been to Heaven?

If you are on crystal meth and looking to stop, there are a variety of resources available online including the New York Crystal Meth Anonymous Intergroup: Home (nycma.org)

Together we watched a small child on a small bike whizzing past adults too close to their legs, turning sharply, and squealing with delight. The child didn’t think about danger: he didn’t care about hurting himself or other people. The child only thought of the moment: his only concern was speed.
“That was me as a kid”, he said.
“That’s you now”, I replied.

Together we looked at a featherless baby bird stranded in the middle of a busy sidewalk. It had fallen from the nest. Not seeing the baby bird, a man stepped on it and killed it and walked on.
“I should have done something”, he said to me. “I should have picked it up and put it in the grass”.
“If you would have, it would have died of starvation eventually”, I said.
And we spent a few minutes discussing which was the better death.