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

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In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg takes on three of the hardest words in recovery: “I need help.” He opens with his own story of leaving home at eighteen, never asking his parents for anything, and building an identity on proving to his family, his church, and his bullies that he was strong and self-sufficient. That same pride kept him in the closet for thirty-six years and nearly kept him from surrendering to meth. Dallas sees the pattern constantly in the high-functioning gay men he coaches: they are the rocks, the listeners, the friends who always show up, fluent at giving support and nearly incapable of receiving it. He traces that back to childhoods where needing something felt dangerous, and names the insidious way meth exploits it, turning reliability into credit so that nobody asks questions when you go quiet.
The core of the episode is a case for using your voice. Secrecy, Dallas argues, is the fuel for chemsex. A craving kept in the dark builds a charge and graduates into euphoric recall; shame needs silence to keep its grip. Naming something out loud turns down its emotional charge and brings the brain back online, which is why one client’s “pre-lapse video,” saying the whole plan into his phone camera until it sounded ridiculous, killed the craving by the fifth try. Dallas then gets practical: five things to tell your person so they can hold your truth without flinching, lecturing, or panicking, and five small ways to start saying things out loud, from asking for a hug to telling on yourself within 24 hours of a use. He closes with permission that this culture rarely gives: it is okay to not be okay, and one true sentence to one person once a week is how the muscle gets built.
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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.
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Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/theaddictsdoc/
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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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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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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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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