Vein maintenance is the idea of moving around injection sites in order to protect the veins from collapsing, and giving them a chance to heal between consuming. There have been some ideas floating around that booty bumping can be a form of vein maintenance for folks who typically like to slam, or inject, their substances. It’s important to note here that booty bumping is really only for water soluble substances like tina or crack, and not for substances like GBL, which can damage the lining of the rectum, and heroin which needs to be dissolved in an acid. So what is booty bumping exactly? Booty bumping is the method of consumption where you dissolve your substance in water, put it into a syringe or lube injector, and then insert the syringe into the anus. With booty bumping, the taboo of substance use intersects with the taboo of anal sex, and often this method of consumption is only talked about in PNP spaces and by 2SLGBTQ+ organizations, but booty bumping isn’t exclusively a “gay thing”. Consuming a substance anally, often called booty bumping, is an under-discussed and under-researched topic when it comes to PNP.
