Substance Use Among Gay Men Living in Mexico: Perceptions of Well-Being and Implications for Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Studies on substance use among gay men are often analyzed from the framework of risk and harm, disregarding the user's perspective about various reasons for use, which for some may not be perceived as potentially harmful. The current study examines substance use among gay men and perceived benefits and adverse effects on their well-being from three unique geographical areas across Mexico. Methods: A mixed methods survey and three online focus groups were conducted in May 2022. Nineteen gay men (average age 32 years) from northern, central, and southern Mexico participated in the study. Data was interpreted utilizing a content analysis. Results: Poppers, crystal meth, and marijuana were the most recently consumed substances, with frequent use reported during sex. First-contact drugs and recreational drugs showed greater perceived social and mental health benefits. In contrast, drugs used during sex had greater perceived adverse effects on overall well-being, primarily with the use of crystal meth. Conclusions: There is an apparent ambivalence with using drugs based on the experiences of gay men participating in this study who live in Mexico. Some participants reported an improvement in mental health and emotional well-being, sexual experiences, and increased socialization. Other participants reported harmful effects upon their health, mental health, and social well-being based on decisions to use substances. Implementing a gay-affirming harm reduction model may improve overall health outcomes for this minority population, as well as their mental health, overall well-being, and care needs. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13178-025-01120-9.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".