A channel built for meeting people also carries invitations to use drugs

Dating apps are a main channel through which men who have sex with men in Thailand find partners. This study asks whether the same channel is also used to invite others to try illicit substances, and how strongly those invitations relate to actual substance use.

A 21-item online survey run from 9 February to 10 March 2016 — a window chosen to span Valentine's Day, when app use is high. 350 people responded: 200 through eight websites and 150 through five social media channels, recruited by convenience sampling. Analysis used descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations and stepwise multiple regression. The study had research ethics approval from the researchers' institution and collected no identifying information.

• About three in four (73.74%) had used a dating app in the previous six months, and most (80.3%) met one other app user per week.
• More than half (54.6%) had been urged through an app to try a substance.
• Among those who had used substances, more than four in five (82.9%) obtained them by sharing with, or buying alongside, people they had met through the apps — the apps function as a distribution channel, not only as a channel for persuasion.
• One in four substance users (25.7%) used at least weekly.
• Two-thirds of substance users combined substances with sex — only 34.3% had sex without using at the same time — and among those who combined the two, 31.4% did not use condoms consistently.
• 77.1% of substance users had not tested for HIV at all in the previous six months.
• The two strongest predictors of substance-use behaviour were the decision to accept an invitation and the satisfaction felt on receiving one — the regression models account for roughly 60% of the behaviour (R² 0.572–0.591). The invitation itself carries more weight than expected, over and above pre-existing attitudes to substances.

For communication design the usable finding is that the point of intervention is the moment an invitation arrives, not the moment of use — the strongest predictor was how someone responded to being asked, not their general attitude to substances. Because the apps serve both to persuade and to distribute, prevention work that waits for people to come looking for information will always arrive after the invitation has. And the very high proportion of substance users who had not tested for HIV suggests that testing messages and substance messages should be designed together rather than run as separate campaigns.