He woke up on a floor he did not recognise. It was past noon. His phone showed seventeen missed calls — his mother, his flatmate, a number he did not have saved. He could not remember the previous night clearly. He could not remember, with any certainty, how many people had been in the room. He was twenty-four years old, he had a PhD to finish, and somewhere between a Grindr notification and that unfamiliar floor, he had lost count of how many sessions there had been, how many weeks had collapsed into this shape.

That was not the worst night. The worst came later, in a hospital. An overdose. His heart had been running at a rate his body was not designed to sustain. The doctors used the word “lucky.” He did not feel lucky. He felt like someone had stolen years from him — and that he had handed them over willingly, one hit at a time, beginning with a question a stranger had asked him after sex: Have you ever tried high fun?

His story, documented by VICE India, is not an isolated case. It is a pattern — and across India’s metros, the pattern is accelerating with a speed that doctors, researchers, and harm reduction workers describe as alarming.

What “High Fun” Really Is — And What It Does To You

The phrase “high fun” sounds harmless. That is precisely the point. It is designed to sound harmless — to be whispered casually, typed quickly, dismissed by anyone who doesn’t already know. On dating apps like Grindr, a single 🚀 rocket emoji in a profile bio carries the same meaning without a word being typed. Harm reduction workers say the symbol has become near-universal in Indian metro chemsex networks. It is an advertisement hiding in plain sight.

What chemsex describes is the deliberate use of specific drugs — crystal methamphetamine, MDMA, GHB, mephedrone — to chemically alter a sexual encounter. The drugs suppress fear and inhibition, manufacture artificial intimacy, and extend sessions for hours. What they do not advertise is what comes after: the memory loss, the infections, the dependency, the slow erasure of the ability to feel anything without a substance in your system.

Below is what each drug actually does — not just the initial effect, but the damage it causes.

There is one more method of consumption that does not appear in casual conversation about party drugs — and that harm reduction workers describe as the point at which recovery becomes exponentially harder. Slamming: injecting the dissolved drug directly into a vein. It delivers an effect so overwhelming that, as one counsellor described it, “everything else becomes pointless after that.” The AIIMS study found that nearly 46% of chemsex participants in India had already crossed into slamsex. Nearly half.

The Numbers India Isn’t Talking About

For years, chemsex in India existed only as rumour — something that happened at certain Goa parties, in certain Delhi apartments, in corners of the internet most people preferred not to examine. In May 2025, the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS, New Delhi published the country’s first serious attempt to measure it. The numbers ended the comfortable fiction that this was a fringe phenomenon.

The researchers were explicit: their sample was an undercount. The survey relied on voluntary self-disclosure through social media. The people most at risk — those deepest in the network, most afraid of exposure — were the least likely to participate. The actual scale of India’s chemsex crisis is larger than any current study has been able to capture.

How People Fall In — And Why Getting Out Is So Hard

Nobody begins chemsex thinking they are beginning chemsex. That is the first thing every harm reduction counsellor, every survivor, every doctor who treats these patients will tell you. It begins with an invitation that sounds like nothing — a casual offer, a reassurance that it is just once, just to try, that everybody does it, that it is fun and harmless and not a big deal.

It Is Happening In Your City

Chemsex in India does not have one address. Delhi. Mumbai. Bangalore. Hyderabad. Pune. Goa. The network is distributed, adaptive, and far larger than the arrests and seizures in any single city suggest.

In Delhi, NCB officials speaking anonymously to IANS confirmed a consistent rise in party drug seizures, especially around festivals. Rave parties in South Delhi farmhouses and NCR venues serve as entry points — a first pill, a first line, a first introduction to a world that will be very difficult to leave. The drugs are cheap. The access, via dating apps and Telegram groups, is frictionless.

In Mumbai, the crisis has been documented since at least 2017. The city’s anonymous apartment towers, its 24-hour culture, and its dense app-user network make it structurally suited to chemsex. In 2024, Mumbai and Hyderabad were specifically identified in international reporting as cities where prevalence is rising.

In Bangalore, it is the specific loneliness of transplant urban life — young professionals far from family, navigating performance anxiety, social isolation, and the pressure of tech-economy careers — that creates vulnerability. A single 95 kg methamphetamine seizure in Greater Noida in 2024 illustrated how mature the supply chains have become. The drugs do not come from Goa anymore. They are already local.

In Chennai, the Madras High Court flagged “dark kitchens” and local chemists repurposed as synthetic drug distribution nodes. In 2025 alone, 228 people were arrested across 110 narcotics cases, and six drug production facilities were dismantled. The demand that drove those facilities did not disappear with the arrests.

The Health Consequences Are Permanent

The damage chemsex does to the body and mind is not a temporary hangover. It is cumulative, structural, and in many cases irreversible. HIV and STI transmission in chemsex settings are dramatically higher than in sober sexual encounters — the drugs suppress the risk-awareness that would otherwise prompt condom use, and the multi-partner, high-session-frequency nature of chemsex networks accelerates exposure exponentially.

Seven of the AIIMS study’s chemsex participants tested HIV positive. That is a 15% HIV prevalence rate within the chemsex subgroup of a study sample — in a country where national HIV prevalence is under 0.2%. Chemsex is not a marginal risk factor. It is a primary driver of new infections in the communities it touches.

Beyond the physical, the psychological destruction is profound and under-reported. Long after the drug is gone from the bloodstream, the brain’s reward system remains altered. Former users describe being unable to experience joy, connection, or intimacy without substances for months or years. Relationships collapse. Careers disintegrate. The person who survives a chemsex dependency is often rebuilding themselves from a significantly diminished foundation — and doing so largely alone, because 80% of those affected never seek help.

A System That Is Not Ready

India’s public health infrastructure for drug dependence was not designed for what is arriving. De-addiction centres under the central Social Justice scheme are unevenly distributed — Maharashtra has 55, UP has 75, but many states have fewer than 10. Chemsex, which sits at the intersection of sexual health and substance dependence, falls between the mandates of almost every existing service. Most counsellors have no specific training for it. Most hospital admission forms have no category for it.

The legal architecture makes things worse. India’s NDPS Act treats possession as a criminal matter, not a health one. The result is entirely predictable: people do not come forward. Doctors do not get referrals. The crisis continues to expand in the space left by silence, shame, and the fear that asking for help will result in arrest rather than treatment.

Harm reduction organisations — YRGCARE in Chennai among the most active — are working to change this. They offer education, testing, and non-judgmental outreach to communities at risk. But they are reaching a fraction of the people who need them. The resources available are a fraction of the scale required.

What You Can Do

If you have read this far and recognised someone — a friend, a sibling, someone you care about — in any of these descriptions, the most important thing to understand is this: chemsex dependency is a medical condition, not a moral failure. The people caught in it did not choose to be there. They made a series of decisions, each of which seemed small and manageable, until the point where nothing was manageable anymore. Judgment will not help them. Access to treatment will.

If you are reading this and you recognise yourself — if the timeline above maps onto your own experience — please use the numbers below. Anonymously if you need to. Today if you can. The longer dependency goes untreated, the more it takes. You do not have to wait until there is a crisis to deserve help.

The rocket emoji is everywhere. The people it is destroying are real, and they are young, and many of them had no idea what they were stepping into. That ignorance is what this article exists to end.