Jason Yamas. I Once Controlled the Crystal Meth Market in the SFO Gay Community

Show Notes

Jason Yamas is a queer fiction and nonfiction writer making his prose debut as author of Tweakerworld: A Memoir (Unnamed Press, 2023). 

Meet Jason: a college educated documentary film producer, cat parent of two, and was one of San Francisco’s top drug dealers. 

After Jason’s world fell apart in LA, he moved to Berkeley for a fresh start with his kid brother. Just one problem: his long-closeted Adderall addiction had exploded into an out-of-control crystal meth binge. Within weeks, Jason plunged into the sprawling ParTy n’ ’Play subculture of the Bay Area’s gay community. It is a wildly decadent scene of drugs, group sex, and criminals, and yet it is also filled with surprising characters, people who continually subverted Jason’s own presumptions of the stereotypical tweaker (A person addicted to methamphetamine).

Soon Jason became a dealer on the pretense of researching this tweaker world for a project that would carry him, like a life raft, back to the shores of a normal life. But his friendly entrepreneurial spirit and trusting disposition disarmed clients and rival dealers alike. The money began to roll in as demand increased to frightening levels. Suddenly, Jason was in control of the entire crystal meth market for San Francisco’s gay community, even as he was nodding off behind the wheel of his car, or walking down the sidewalk. As friends and family worked frantically to steer him towards recovery, Jason resisted, chasing something else: a sleepless nirvana fueled by sex, drugs, and the Tweakerworld. 

With painful honesty, Jason Yamas has crafted a landmark narrative that is not just a personal account of addiction, but a portrait of a vulnerable, largely undocumented community of people who, for many reasons, have been marginalized to the point of invisibility.

Prior to his foray into literature, he produced documentary and narrative films such as Jonathan Caouette's Walk Away Renee (SundanceNow) and Stephen Winter's Jason & Shirley (Criterion). He produced charity arts and music projects in Detroit with the late great songwriter Allee Willis ("September", The Friends Theme, The Color Purple.) His self-directed and produced feature Not Me, Murphy premiered at the MIX NYC Film Festival. He's currently writing his first novel and pursuing acting training at the Sanford Meisner Center. He holds a BFA from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts in Drama and has performed in and directed in the experimental downtown New York theatre scene. With the publication of Tweakerworld, he intends to shine a bright light on the worsening epidemic of crystal meth in the LGBTQ+ community.

Intro and Outro music by:

Decisions by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100756

Artist: http://incompetech.com/