Chemsex is still too often written about as if it were a room.

A darkened flat, a mattress on the floor, a handful of men whose names dissolve by morning, and a moral lesson waiting patiently at the end. The implication is that chemsex exists there, in that space, and that if you could simply avoid it - or leave it in time - the problem would remain largely theoretical.

It is a comforting fiction. Rooms have doors. Doors can be closed.

But chemsex does not behave like a room. It behaves like infrastructure.

It has entry points, transfer points, bottlenecks and redundancies. It has its own logistics, its own norms, and a curious capacity to keep moving even when parts of it fail. It does not rely on one catastrophic decision so much as a series of small, increasingly frictionless ones - each individually survivable, collectively transformative.

Or, to put it differently: chemsex persists not because people are reckless, but because the system is remarkably well designed.

This essay argues that chemsex functions as infrastructure rather than isolated behaviour.

“In digital worlds,” I’ve written before, “men can have ten conversations, five orgasms, and zero witnesses - which is sometimes the point.” The absence of witnesses is not accidental. It is part of the appeal, and part of the architecture.

The supply chain begins, predictably, with apps. These are still often described as neutral meeting spaces, as though desire would otherwise wander the streets unsupervised. But platforms are not passive. They reward speed. They privilege availability. They turn responsiveness into a social virtue and hesitation into a kind of inefficiency.

In that environment, chemsex rarely announces itself as a dramatic pivot. It arrives quietly, as optimisation. A shortcut. A shared understanding that saves time. “What you into?” becomes less a question of fantasy than of logistics.

This matters because contemporary drug markets are no longer slow or especially visible. Synthetic substances circulate quickly, adaptively, and often opaquely. What changes from year to year is not only which drugs are in circulation, but how easily they can be obtained, combined, and delivered. When sexual networking platforms sit upstream of that reality, they function less like social venues and more like distribution nodes.

From there, movement into private channels is almost inevitable. WhatsApp groups, Telegram threads, invite-only lists - these are not peripheral. They are the routing layer. They coordinate time, place, and expectation. They filter who is in and who is out. They also do something more subtle: they normalise.

Private groups are where behaviours stop feeling experimental and start feeling standard. Where dosage becomes casual conversation. Where silence is learned. Where the rules are not written down, but everyone knows when they have broken them.

Deleting an app, in this context, is often suggested as an act of decisive self-care. In practice, it is frequently symbolic. By the time someone considers deleting the app, the supply chain has usually already rerouted itself.

“Deleting the app doesn’t end the night,” as I’ve said before. “It just moves it to a different room.”

Then there is delivery. One of the least remarked-upon shifts in chemsex culture is how completely it has absorbed the language and logic of on-demand service. Substances arrive quickly, discreetly, and reliably. When drugs are as accessible as food delivery, escalation no longer feels like escalation. It feels like convenience.

This has consequences. When access is frictionless, the internal negotiations that once slowed people down - Do I really want this? Is it worth the effort? - lose their force. The room decides for you. The group decides. The moment decides. How terrifyingly easy.

The party, often treated as the centre of the story, is really just the point of consumption. It is also the point of production. Parties manufacture norms.

Every party teaches something: what is normal to take, what is normal to tolerate and what is normal to forget. It teaches bodies how quickly intimacy can arrive when chemically assisted, and how intolerable boredom or awkwardness should feel in comparison. It teaches nervous systems to expect acceleration.

This is why chemsex can feel, to some people, oddly functional. Not chaotic but organised. Not transgressive, but efficient. It offers a solution - temporary, pharmacologically subsidised, and increasingly reliable - to loneliness, inhibition, and desire in a culture that offers few slow or forgiving routes to connection.

Clinically, the picture is less elegant. Chemsex is associated with increased sexual health risk, psychological distress, and complex patterns of help-seeking. Responses across health, justice, and social care systems remain uneven and often poorly coordinated. None of this is controversial. It is, however, persistently under-integrated.