June—Pride Month—is drawing to a close. And as usual, one of the most undertold stories about America’s LGBTQ community has gone untold for yet another year.
Namely: How deeply and negatively drugs affect this marginalized community.
Here’s a quick tour of some of the (very bad) data around LGBTQ people and this health disaster.
For instance:
Gay men are almost twice as likely to be past-month marijuana users as straight people, according to Department of Health and Human Services numbers
Over one in three LGBTQ+ youth (34%) has reported past-year marijuana use, including 29% of LGBTQ+ youth under the age of 21, per Trevor Project data
The Addiction Center states that approximately 42% of the LGBTQ+ population reported marijuana as their drug of choice. Meanwhile, the marijuana consensus among the general population is 19%
LGBTQ youth who experienced “conversion therapy” are 25% more likely to report regular marijuana use; those who experience physical harm due to LGBTQ identity are 62% more likely to report regular marijuana use than those who did not, per the California Department of Public Health
But it’s not just pot:
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 6.7% of LGBTQ+ individuals misused prescription opioids in 2020, almost twice the 3.6% of the general population with opioid misuse reports
Columbia University published findings that gay men’s rate of illegal stimulant use was three times that of straight men
The Trevor Project found that more than one in 10 (11%) of LGBTQ+ youth reported past-year use of a prescription drug that was not prescribed to them; Native/Indigenous LGBTQ youth are 144% more likely to report regular (daily or weekly) misuse of prescription drugs than White LGBTQ youth and Multiracial LGBTQ youth are 36% more likely to report regular prescription drug misuse than White LGBTQ youth
Some people explain this as self-medication due to the stresses inflicted by marginal status; others, as the result of carefully targeted advertising campaigns from Big Marijuana.
Whatever drives them, these numbers represent a big threat to public health—one that the media seems curiously uninterested in covering.