Miami Herald - Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Steve Rothaus, srothaus@herald.com

"My friends were doing it," Anthony said. "I knew about it before, but I waited until my senior year to do everything."

Now he takes Ecstasy once a month. Or more.

"It's a stimulant drug," he said in an interview. 'It makes you feel so good. You want to rub yourself. It's a very 'touchy' drug. You wait about an hour and all of a sudden everything feels so good."

Anthony feels "more sexual" when taking Ecstasy.

"You just let loose. . . . You do things you would not do normally," said Anthony, who confides that he stopped using protection with his boyfriend of four months after they both tested negative for HIV.

Anthony, 18, also spoke last week at the first of several training workshops for Miami-Dade and Broward community leaders who work in law enforcement, substance abuse counseling and other related fields. The training is by PROTECT, a South Florida Regional Prevention Center project that aims to reduce club-drug use.

The high-risk target group: "YMSM," Young Men who have Sex with other Men.

The PROTECT project avoids labeling their sexual identities.

"Labels are for clothes," said Dr. Marilyn Volker, a Coral Gables sexologist who helped train 26 participants at the nine-hour workshop.

Many young men are unwilling to be labeled gay or bisexual, Volker said.

"Assumptions and labeling lower self-esteem," she said. "You get a kid or an adult with a lower self-esteem, they are going to take risks. This workshop was about prevention. If we want people to tell the truth, it means we have to not put people in boxes, and see the range of sexual identity."

Using Ecstasy is a common "coping technique" by teens struggling with their sexual identities, Volker said. "How to deal with isolation, depression, frustration, lying -- coping by drugs, alcohol, suicide."

"Florida's rate of Ecstasy use is above the national average," said PROTECT coordinator William Ayala, a former associate director for a New York middle school.

According to a 2000 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, about one-third of gay and bisexual men reported using Ecstasy at least once per month. And a recent prevention center focus group of 18 YMSM ages 13 to 24 revealed that 78 percent used club drugs, Ayala said.

Until now there has been no local drug program targeting YMSM, Ayala said.

The first step is conducting training sessions for police, teachers and other "community stakeholders" throughout Dade and Broward counties.

"I've never had any training about this," said Miami Police Detective Eladio Paez, a consortium member who gave a presentation at the workshop.

"I learned more about this [at the workshop] than I ever heard of before," Paez told The Herald. "This is not a group where people raise their hands during Red Ribbon Week and say, 'I'm a male who has sex with males and . . ."

PROTECT is also developing a website to provide accurate drug information for young people.

"These kids are turning to the Internet. They're looking to find other like-minded people," Ayala said. "We're going to provide a chat room for YMSM -- a positive chat room, not an AOL chat room.

AOL chat rooms are not monitored. A lot of time the information you find on AOL chat rooms is erroneous and harmful."

All PROTECT chat rooms will be moderated by trained peer counselors, Ayala said.

Many young people believe club drugs are harmless.

"They think that way and they're very wrong," Paez said. "Ecstasy may be way worse than cocaine -- the damage it causes in the brain.

. . . We know the problems crack has done with the community and this is much worse."

Club-drug overdoses can cause organ damage.

Also, these drugs often cause people to lose their inhibitions and fail to take precautions when they have sex, leading to the transmission of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, Paez said.

"They wake up somewhere, they know they had sex and they had not protected themselves," he said. "I had a guy who said that if he hadn't had a binge of crystal meth, just one time, he would be HIV-free today. These are the dangers of those drugs, whether you are gay, heterosexual, YSM or whatever initials you go by."

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