The AfterMeth: Gay Men Recovering from Crystal Methamphetamine and Chemsex Addiction

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/neuroscience
Season 3 of The AfterMeth Podcast is the season of big names, and Dallas Bragg lands one of the biggest in addiction education: Dr. Nicole Labor, addiction medicine physician, author of The Addictoholic Deconstructed, self-described sweary godmother, and a person in long-term recovery whose reels on the science of addiction have reached millions. Dallas discovered her through her chemsex reel (still her most-watched ever), read her book, and now recommends it to every client because it finally made the neuroscience click. In this conversation, Nicole explains why addiction is a disease, introduces her brand-new baseball-field metaphor for dopamine and receptor downregulation, and unpacks glutamate, the “executive assistant to dopamine” that files meth, sex, Grindr, porn, a room, and a time of night into one learned network that any single cue can switch on.
The second half gets practical in ways chemsex recovery rarely does. Nicole explains why cravings negotiate rather than announce themselves (“I’m just checking who’s on”), why the addicted brain only has to convince you to take the next step, and why interrupting the loop with something as simple as cold water or thirty seconds of jumping still counts even if you use afterward. She and Dallas cover why sneaking and lying get stamped as rewarding, why sex addiction and Grindr scrolling are addiction all the same, how to “dopamine stack” your way out of the flat, gray early months, and why a two-week slip after six months clean leaves you with seven months, not zero. Her closing instruction for anyone in early recovery: get in the lifeboat first. You can figure out what to do on shore once you get there.
Contact Dr. Nicole Labor:
Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/theaddictsdoc/
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Dallas Bragg
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/concept
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg returns to a moment early in his recovery that quietly changed everything. Preparing to share his story for the first time at a spiritual center, he pulled out his family's old photo albums and found page after page of an unhappy little boy: scowling, arms crossed, visibly out of place among smiling relatives. For a long time he used those images to build a case against his family, his church, and his classmates. Then, putting the photos back years later, he realized he had skipped right past every picture of himself laughing with his brother, opening Christmas presents, and hugging his grandmother. His brain had been so trained to find the negative that the joyful photos had become invisible. That discovery became the turning point where he stepped outside the self-concept he had written and began to see the whole picture.
From there, Dallas draws on NLP pioneer Steve Andreas's idea that a self-concept is not a belief but a collection of examples, a mental photo album the brain flips through for evidence. Ask "Am I reliable?" and the brain does not answer with a word; it shows you pictures, and in early recovery the frowning ones come first. The most useful insight for men in chemsex recovery is that a strong self-concept includes counterexamples. Instead of "I'm chemsex-free," a fragile album that gets thrown out after one slip, the truthful statement is "I'm chemsex-free, and sometimes I'm not." Dallas challenges listeners to count honestly and recognize they are chemsex-free more often than not, to treat a using episode as a photo with a note on the back rather than a verdict, and to imagine what their self-concept album would show a stranger if it sat unedited on the coffee table. The work, he reminds us, takes repetition, because the brain will keep reaching for the old curated album of transgressions. But you get to choose which album sits on the shelf.
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/smart
For a year, Dallas Bragg has wanted to bring an alternative to the 12 steps onto The AfterMeth Podcast, and this episode delivers it with two guests whose lived experience runs straight through chemsex. Gus Curran is SMART Recovery’s senior director of training and program development, a facilitator for nearly a decade, and ten years meth and alcohol free after a path that ran from ecstasy in the LA club scene to isolated meth use and treatment that, he realized only later, addressed the drug but never the sex. Zach Reedy, a substance use counselor and president of SMART Recovery NYC, met meth on the apps at 27 and lost everything: job, car, housing, with years unhoused in Florida, an HIV diagnosis that got them into care, Zoom rooms before the pandemic, and daily psychosis in New York before a neighbor walked them to their first meeting. Both now spend their lives making recovery spaces more inclusive, and both say the same thing Dallas has been saying for years: whatever you use meth for, it eventually takes that away.
The conversation is a full introduction to SMART Recovery: a secular, evidence-informed mutual support community where you set your own goal, choose your own language, and no one tells you what you must do. Gus and Zach explain why crosstalk is the heart of a meeting, how trained facilitators keep a mixed room supportive, the four points (motivation, urges, thoughts and feelings, balanced living), and the tools that changed their lives, from the cost-benefit analysis to the question nobody had ever asked Gus: “What do you love about it?” They are honest about SMART’s weak spot, fellowship, and what they are building to fix it. And they share two analogies every listener should keep: when you lapse, you do not pour out the fishbowl, and when your car breaks down in Kansas City, you fix it there and keep driving. Gus is offering AfterMeth listeners a free facilitator training code in the show notes.

Gus and Zack invite listeners to learn more about SMART Recovery and consider getting involved.
Take the SMART Recovery 4-Point Meeting Facilitator Training for free. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of SMART’s approach and tools, and you may decide to start a new meeting or support an existing one.
We’d especially love to grow the number of LGBTQ+ SMART Recovery meetings available to support people who want to make changes related to chemsex, sexualized drug use, or other addictive behaviors. This training is the first step toward becoming a SMART facilitator or meeting helper.
Zach and I would like to start a national LGBTQ+ SMART Meeting and are looking for people who may be interested in helping us launch the first SMART National LGBTQ+ meeting. We’ll need co-facilitators, people to help manage chat, and volunteers who can support Zoom and other meeting technology.
There is absolutely no requirement to start or help with a meeting, though. We invite you to take the training, learn more about SMART, and see whether our approach resonates with you.
Code: AFTERMETHSMART
Register here: https://training.smartrecovery.org/course/gsf201-lms-en-01
Offer expires: December 31, 2026
Register now and complete the training at your own pace.
Questions? Email support@smartrecovery.org and put Chemsex in the subject line.
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Dallas Bragg
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/goodnews
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg names a trigger that almost nobody in recovery talks about: good news. He opens with his own pattern from his drug court years, when he found himself relapsing after nearly every NA key tag and drove straight from the courthouse to pick up a guy to party on the day he was released from probation. Milestones, he realized, were one of his biggest danger zones, and he suspects they are for many listeners too. Dallas walks through G. Alan Marlatt's cognitive-behavioral model of relapse, which shows that while negative emotions and interpersonal conflict account for most relapses, positive emotional states are a real category of their own. In those moments, people are not trying to escape a feeling. They are trying to amplify one, and meth amplifies better than almost anything on earth.
The heart of the episode is a simple neurological reframe: during active use, the brain learned the rule "big feeling, use," and it does not distinguish between a promotion and a breakup. Both are intensity, and intensity is the trigger. Dallas unpacks the "I deserve it" whisper that arrives exactly when defenses are lowest, and why milestone days are the sneakiest version, since nobody thinks to check on someone who looks like they are winning. He then turns practical: put good news on your danger zone list, train your recovery team to go on alert when something good happens, run fire drills for the hours after a celebration when the dopamine dives, and keep doing the boring daily work on your best days, because a routine that only shows up when you are struggling is not a routine. He closes with compassion and a promise: plan for these inflationary experiences, get through enough of them, and eventually you just get to live your life.
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/foundation
This episode of The AfterMeth Podcast is unlike any other. Instead of a clinician or author, Dallas Bragg hosts a panel of three people connected to the LGBT Foundation in the UK, each with a direct, lived relationship to chemsex, brought together with help from Reese, the Foundation's sexual health coordinator, whom Dallas met at the chemsex conference in Belgium. Hugh moved from Derry to Manchester alone and watched crystal meth take his jobs, his housing, and nearly his life before spending two and a half years finding himself again. Patrick, also known as Kitana, came from Barbados at 17, was diagnosed with HIV at 20, survived a devastatingly abusive relationship that left him with a rare early-onset dementia, and used meth to block it all out before becoming a leading HIV and dementia advocate. Luke runs NeuroQueers, a community for queer neurodivergent people, and brings a more sporadic history with meth and cocaine alongside a longer battle with alcohol.
What follows is raw, funny in places, and relentlessly honest. The panel talks about sexual assault while on chems and the shame that keeps men from asking for help, what comes flooding back once the substance is gone, why therapy is essential and why it can also trigger relapse, and how recovery differs for neurodivergent people who have to break both the addiction and the routine of using. They share what sober sex has actually been like, the importance of being honest with a partner about what you have been through, and why the way someone responds to "I relapsed" can change everything. Running through it all is a single thread: tell someone, face what you were numbing, find the people who get it, and take responsibility so you can finally forgive yourself. A supplemental study guide is linked in the show notes.
Contact:
Reece Boulton Email:  reece.boulton@lgbt.foundation
Website: https://lgbt.foundation/
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Dallas Bragg
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YouTube: The Aftermeth Podcast
X: https://twitter.com/Drdallasbragg
Free online course to End the Relapse Cycle: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/e7c2Eo22/checkout
Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout