All it takes is a few drops.



Slipped into a drink with a distinctive flavour — Coca-Cola, perhaps, or Lucozade — and the taste vanishes. Just the right amount could flood you with euphoria and disinhibition, heightening sexual arousal, like alcohol drowned in ecstasy. But half a millilitre too much and you can be unconscious within minutes.

If you are lucky, you will keep breathing.

This is the drug known as G, the street name for two almost identical illegal substances: GHB and GBL (which becomes GHB in the body). G is most often used in so-called chemsex situations, where two or more men use it alongside crystal meth and other drugs to enhance sex. It has been taken recreationally since the 1990s, but its routine use as a weapon by murderers and rapists has, like a spiked drink, gone largely unchecked — and its damage overall has been largely undocumented.

Now, for the first time, the scale of G’s harm can be revealed.

An eight-month investigation by BuzzFeed News and Channel 4 Dispatches — for a new documentary called Dispatches: Sex, Drugs and Murder — exposes such widespread levels of G abuse among gay men that many users are calling it an “epidemic” with an array of harmful consequences: addiction, violence, sexual violence, overdose, death, and suicide.

All of this is being facilitated by a loophole in the law through which dealers, organised criminals, and those who wish to rape, kill, and in some cases, profit from sexual violence are able to obtain industrial quantities of the substances from abroad.

The investigation includes the largest-ever survey into G use among gay and bisexual men, conducted in association with the Terrence Higgins Trust and the University of Cambridge. More than 5,000 people responded, of whom over 2,700 were gay and bisexual men who have taken G. Nearly two-thirds (62.5%) said they had suffered serious problems from the drug, including loss of consciousness, addiction, hospitalisation, and sexual assault.

From the survey and investigation, which includes 133 Freedom of Information requests, BuzzFeed News and Dispatches can reveal:

Sexual violence facilitated by G is so widespread that almost everyone who had taken it said they knew someone who had been raped or sexually assaulted while on it.

Over a quarter had been assaulted themselves.

Young men are being drugged with G and raped, with the abuse filmed and livestreamed over the dark web.

Overdose is so common as to be normalised, or even seen as a “rite of passage”.

One London hospital saw G overdoses almost every day — over 300 in one year.

Deaths from G are being missed because it is not routinely tested for after a sudden death.

G use among heterosexuals is rising.





To back up the data from the anonymous online survey, BuzzFeed News and Dispatches also conducted more than 140 face-to-face interviews with gay and bisexual men who take G. The interviewees conveyed similar stories, to similar degrees, at similar rates.



The picture that emerged was almost unfathomable in its darkness. The volume of those being victimised is beyond what police and the medical profession could contain.

This is helped by the chemical nature of the drug itself, what doctors and toxicologists describe as the unusually steep “dose response curve” — the minuscule difference between a dose that delivers a desired high and one that kills.

A more lethal phenomenon, evident throughout the investigation, also stops help from arriving: silence. Stigma surrounding sex, sexual violence, drug use, and homosexuality — all exacerbated by the drugs’ illegality — means users and bereaved loved ones often keep quiet. Information that might be shared is being muzzled. Life-saving harm reduction is being thwarted.

In one key area, experts warned, this relates to addiction. Users can quickly fall into physical dependence, but many are unaware that withdrawal itself can kill. Heroin withdrawal, by contrast, is not lethal.