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The documentary I made that’s on tonight is personal. Everything changed 2 yrs ago. I’d been reporting on the darker sides of chemsex and G since the trial of serial killer Stephen Port. People told me how many people they knew who’d died from G. But then I got a call.
My first boyfriend from 20 years ago, who I’m still friends with, phoned to say he had just come out of hospital. He’d been in a coma for 5 days and came very close to dying. All he did was pick up the wrong drink. It had G in it.
I put my hand over the receiver so he couldn’t hear me crying: the idea that I could've lost him, my first love, and my connection back to the past, that most special of times, was unbearable. He is the most beautiful soul. All the stories I’d heard as a reporter now became real.
So much of this seems so unreal: the numbers dying, the numbers being raped, the lives being ruined, disappearing into addiction or drug-induced psychosis. So much is wrapped in silence or stigma. All the suffering cloaked and hidden.
I knew I had to do something. I had to make it real for as many people as I could. I started looking for families. I thought if a mother would speak out, that might shake people, make it real; to see her grief. To know what it does to families.
Eventually I found the Bloor family. They were so brave, even though their pain was so raw. From then I found Brian Paddick, and it built from there. I told Dorothy Byrne, the head of new and current affairs at Channel 4. I told her about the deaths.
How many deaths there might be, how no one knows the full number – and why. I told her about the overdosing, accidental and deliberate. And I told her about the sexual violence that this drug enables. She listened. She was horrified. And she suggested a sensitive exec producer.
6 months later the film was commissioned. 8 months later, having conducted the largest ever survey into gay/bi men who take G, having filed over 130 FOI requests, filmed dozens of hours of footage and interviewed people all over the country, the film is finished.
Please watch it tonight. It’s on Channel 4 at 11pm. It’s called Sex, Drugs and Murder. Please stop this epidemic being hidden. Please make it real for you and others. There is information in it that can save lives. Thank you.
