“People don’t realize that it is life and death for people who go through rehab,” Morris said in an interview with OUTinPerth, a gay Australian website. Morris argued that social media sites should remove profiles of users who are evidently selling illegal drugs. Currently Grindr is partnering with the City of West Hollywood and an organization called Hackathon to develop apps to address LGBT issues such as homelessness and transgender visibility.ĭespite all that, Grindr remains controversial in some countries and communities because of the way it can be used to find and buy meth.Ī young man named Jay Morris, 24, raised a red flag about the problem in Australia when he went public last year about his meth addiction, which caused him to lose his job as a television presenter and sent him into rehab for two years. Grindr also has launched its own clothing line. And Grindr partnered with the federal Centers for Disease Control, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Gilead, the maker of the drug Truvada, to survey gay men about the use of Truvada as a measure to prevent infection with HIV, which is a common consequence of meth use. Grindr’s corporate website (not its mobile app) also has added information about LGBT rights campaigns around the world. Recent press releases describe Grindr as a social network for gay men, downplaying sex. In the past year the company, whose name has come to mean “gay hookup app” in the way “Kleenex” is understood to mean “tissue,” has been trying to recast its image. A Chinese company recently purchased a 60% interest in Grindr for $93 million.
Simkhai, who launched Grindr in 2009, lives in Los Angeles and is active in the West Hollywood gay community (he has been a contributor to City Councilmember John Duran’s re-election campaigns). Its founder, Joel Simkhai, has not responded to requests from WEHOville for comment about that.
Grindr, which recently announced a redesign of its app, hasn’t taken any evident steps to do that. Screen shot of a local Grindr profile promoting “partying.” Others have designed their apps to make it impossible to include on public profiles emoji and text that signal drug use or sale, and some, such as Scruff, perhaps Grindr’s biggest competitor, have taken active steps to block words or symbols used in profiles by drug dealers and users. It is one of the few popular gay hookup apps where someone looking to buy meth in the early morning hours in West Hollywood (and greater Los Angeles, the United States and the world) can find a dealer. That mobile phone app, used by gay men primarily to find others for sex, claims two million users in 192 countries. You can go on Grindr, a mobile hookup app headquartered on the 14th floor of the Pacific Design Center’s Red Building in West Hollywood. In West Hollywood you don’t need to leave your apartment to cruise down “Vaseline Alley” or into the dimly lit bathroom of a gay bar to buy the drug. supply coming across the border with Mexico according to a 2014 report by state Attorney General Kamala Harris.īut where are the retail marketplaces for the drug, considered the most destructive form of addiction among gay men? In this world where many gay men first meet their partners (sexual and/or romantic) virtually rather than face-to-face, it is online. California is the primary gateway for smuggling methamphetamine into the United States, with an estimated 70% of the U.S.