Category Archives: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Amending The Rave Act Is Possible. Let’s Not Miss Our Chance.

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Halloween is upon us and with it, some of the largest parties of the season. To expand on what’s happening 4:30 PM (1:30 PM PST) during our #FestFriday discussion on Twitter, I wanted to explain one of the biggest problems in the dance community today, the RAVE Act. I’ve written about this extensively on a much larger blog, EDMTunes. The short story is, laws that were created to prosecute people who rented to crack dealers, were used to prosecute rave producers. Public comment on the laws and aggressive prosecution especially after tragic events essentially destroyed the EDM boom of the mid 2000’s. Any of us old enough to be keeping score can tell you about how certain clubs got obliterated, gangbusters style. NYC, DC, LA, you name it, nights were being ruined. This was done under the pretext of protecting children from unscrupulous dealers, and Joe Biden did his best to ensure that no one danced to hardstyle, happy hardcore or techno again.

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2CI, For Many, A Better Class Of Criminal.

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I alluded to something that I wanted to explore a little more this week. The idea that research chemicals are being done because the drugs people “want” to be doing aren’t available. This idea is not new. The drug that we’re speaking about on Drug Fact Friday (Get at us on Twitter using #2CFrIday today at 4:30 PM EST, 1:30 PM if you’re blessed to live over there) is 2C-I. To note, this is not the 2c–NBOMe drug that we talked about last week. We’re not high, this is actually a drug that was made illegal in 2012. That’s 5 minutes ago in the grand scheme of things. This is the reason why.

When drugs become harder to find, people don’t stop doing drugs, they simply seek analogues. “Analogues,” are essentially drugs that have similar arrays of effects, while not being the same specific chemical. For example, some people would do amphetamines if they couldn’t find cocaine, while others would seek mushrooms if they couldn’t get acid or whatever. This stuff hasn’t been researched, but if you hang around users enough, these patterns become apparent. People seek a certain assortment of physical/mental/emotional symptoms, and repeat their experience until they get it. When they can’t get it, they go looking. People who couldn’t get classical hallucinogens in the 00’s turned to 2C-I and a couple of other research chemicals. The substances were still legal to synthesize, so it was a simple matter of ordering them online and blocking off a Saturday to be a human guinea pig. Again, I want to stress, these are chemicals large volumes of people just haven’t done. We’ve not seen any real terrifying effects, but to note, we don’t have good data (again). Duration of trip ranges from 4-18 hours. I want to repeat that. Different people taking the same dose, have trips that vary in length by a factor of 4. You got anything to do on Monday?

I’m being glib of course, but I want to remind people of a concern that comes up when people decide to experiment. It was used primarily when you couldn’t find LSD or mushrooms, and that reinforces my point from last week. Making drugs illegal forces people to make more risky decisions in search of the same experience. This in turn leads to medical spending and a general bad time if things don’t go swimmingly. Seems unnecessary to me. There are plenty of reports about the substance online at Erowid and if you want to read the notes of the inventor, here is the reference from Pihkal.

NBOMe, TomorrowWorld, Woodstock And Honesty.

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I believe, if left unchecked, NBOMe will damage the dance music scene on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the RAVE Act. I’ve been doing some research for the last several months, and this issue has continued to crop up. 25i, NBOMe or N-Bomb, as it’s called, has been repeatedly showing up at festivals and parties on the East Coast. At this point, NBOMe has killed more Americans than Ebola. I don’t mean to be glib, but there just in the last month there are NBOMe associated deaths reported in Boca, Boston & Mankato, Minnesota. There’s also been reports of people using/dying in Australia, but of more concern to our domestic festival attendees, TomorrowWorld may have had some of this stuff as well.

Something happened at TomorrowWorld that I think illustrates really the central issue that American festival culture needs to confront. This is a market demand issue at its core, but threads into every aspect of both festival & club culture. I was told by some people working at TomorrowWorld that rumors were going around kids needed medical transport around the time a “bad batch of LSD” seemed to hit the festival. Apparently 6 medical transports were needed to take care of people, and they had similar symptoms. This smacks of kids being sold NBOMe that’s being passed off as LSD. TomorrowWorld takes safety very seriously, but it’s very hard to prevent this kind of thing. To stress, there were no deaths, but people needed attention, because of greed & dishonesty. This isn’t even a new phenomenon. There are documented calls of “do not eat the brown acid” at Woodstock. And if you don’t believe me HERE IS THE AUDIO. 50 years later, and we’re still fighting the same fight. I think this can only be dealt with doing two things.

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