Grindr repeatedly banned a specialist health adviser from its platform for providing information to its users who were seeking help for drug problems — while dealers continued to sell chemsex drugs through the app, BuzzFeed News can reveal.

Ignacio Labayen de Inza, an expert in chemsex substance abuse, was removed by Grindr multiple times without explanation after he set up a profile signposting people to where they could access advice. While doing so, he also catalogued dozens of drug dealers openly selling crystal methamphetamine and GHB/GBL (“G”) on the platform, the very drugs prompting users to seek help.

Following months of conversations with dealers and users through the hook-up app — all conducted on a voluntary basis — Labayen de Inza handed over a cache of evidence detailing wide-scale and explicit drug dealing on Grindr to executives at the company.

He also provided documents capturing more than 2,600 requests for advice from gay and bisexual men who approached him worried about their drug use. Both sets of files were designed to illustrate the need for delivering harm-reduction efforts through the app and included proposals about how best to offer that.

But after the multinational company initially engaged with Labayen de Inza, promising to act and even acknowledging the drug dealing being committed, Grindr executives told him to report drug dealers himself — and then stopped responding. Despite eventually reinstating his profile after more than four months of appeals, the company also refused to explain why they had been blocking him, beyond an apparent, unspecified breach of “community guidelines”.

When approached by BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for Grindr did not deny that people were dealing drugs on the app but said the company was trying to manage it by blocking accounts and enabling fellow users to report suspicious behaviour.

This, according to Labayen de Inza, is not working. Once blocked, dealers can simply open a new account using a new email address, he said. As such, the attempts to stop dealers are for him comparable to that of Twitter and Facebook in their containment of online hatred and abuse: risible.

The entirety of his evidence, compiled between January and June this year, can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News.

It exposes a major drug market operating with near impunity through the world’s largest gay hookup platform. It also reveals the devastation such sales are causing those who buy the drugs, the barriers preventing them from finding treatment, and the thwarted efforts of one individual trying to intervene.

Health professionals have for years been trying to raise the alarm about chemsex, the term given to men having sex with each other under the influence of drugs like crystal meth and GHB which heighten the experience. Last month, BuzzFeed News published the results of the largest ever survey into gay and bisexual men who take GHB, revealing that just over half (51%) had overdosed, nearly a third (28%) had been sexually assaulted under the influence, 1 in 7 (14%) had suffered addiction or mental illness as a result of the drug, and more than a quarter (27%) knew someone who had died from it.

“This is the biggest tragedy happening in the gay community since the years of AIDS,” Labayen de Inza told BuzzFeed News, referring to the devastation chemsex drugs are causing. “And the biggest obstacle to supporting those who have lost control is coming from Grindr.”