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/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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Dallas Bragg
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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

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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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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

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/decide
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg challenges one of recovery culture's most rigid ideas: the day one. He shares that the date he publicly uses isn't when his recovery began. It began on a hotel bed, when sunlight broke through the curtain and a voice cut through the static to say, "I'm done." He used many times after that morning, but each time felt worse and more disconnected. Dallas uses the story to introduce Prochaska and DiClemente's Stages of Change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. He then points to a gap in the model. It jumps from doing it to having done it, with no name for the stretch in between where most men actually live.
Dallas names that gap Stage 4.5: The Becoming. In this stage a man is taking action and still using. He is building new patterns by hand, leaning on unreliable willpower, and hitting plateaus that invite shame every time the counter resets to zero. Dallas reframes relapse here as contrast and data rather than failure, and offers a mantra: "This is something I do until it's something I am." What carries a man across to maintenance, he argues, is three things:
A visceral, five-senses prophetic vision of the man he is becoming.
A heart-led why rooted in identity rather than consequences.
A daily anchor practiced regardless of mood or relapse.
The episode closes with a reminder that the timeline belongs to no one else and that each man is the executive of his own recovery. The study guide linked in the show notes includes a downloadable Stages of Change document with Stage 4.5 added.

Study Guide Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cCvwZ6v8NOYF9gPwtn0G-egNeDm6xzeX/view
The AfterMeth:
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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

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/dynamics
Dallas Bragg has been asked one question more than almost any other: what do I do when someone I love is using? In this episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, he finally sits down with someone equipped to answer it. Charlie Bray is a counselor, former treatment center clinician, and family and loved ones recovery coach with 18 years in recovery, years of facilitating family intensives alongside Mell McCracken, and lived experience on both sides of addiction in a family. Dallas opens with his own story: a mother who thought his drug arrest meant marijuana, made every mistake in the book, and eventually did the right thing. Charlie's central point reframes the whole conversation. Family dynamics exist long before anyone picks up a substance, and the using is usually a symptom of how the family already operates.
The conversation is packed with practical wisdom for parents, partners, and friends. Charlie and Dallas redefine "help" as something other than convincing and managing, unpack why fear so often shows up as anger, and walk through Pia Mellody's framework for codependency and where real self-worth comes from. They tackle the hardest scenarios head on: lending money ("I won't give you cash, but I'll pay for treatment"), refusing to let someone use in your home as an act of love, what to say at the emergency room, and the partner who keeps disappearing on binges. Running through it all is Charlie's insistence that loving someone does not mean funding their slow death, and that a held boundary tells your loved one, without words, that you believe they are capable. This is part one of two, and it previews the Holiday Healing webinar series for addicts and the people who love them, launching in November.
Contact Charlie:
Instagram: @family.recovery
Email Address: charlie@cbbrecoveryservices.com
The AfterMeth:
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Dallas Bragg
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdallasbragg/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drdallasbragg
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