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djyogi
Senior Member
Australia
487 posts
Joined: Apr, 2002
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 Posted - 2002/10/22 : 20:38:48
Hey no more raves in the states after reading this i felt sad for the American ravers. Looks like illegal raves will be happening though.
Chemical Warfare: The RAVE Act
Will Doig, Metro Weekly
October 8, 2002
At the security checkpoint, a man in a windbreaker asks you to remove your jacket, your shoes and your hat. You lift your arms parallel to the floor and he frisks just about every inch of your body. Your hair is searched. He checks your piercings. You lift up your tongue so he can look underneath with a flashlight. You think, "So this is how produce feels." You pass the inspection, minus one Chapstick.
This is not the scene at airport security on a "heightened state of alert" day. This is a party, and you're in the pre-party phase. Up against the wall and spread 'em. And try to relax.
It's a scene partygoers have become familiar with. Searches, pat-downs, and confiscations of "paraphernalia" have become SOP at many venues, courtesy of the War on Drugs. And the pressure put on promoters to keep their events substance-free is about to ratchet up a notch, as congress ponders the controversial Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act, adorably nicknamed the RAVE Act.
The act threatens lengthy prison terms for party promoters whose patrons are caught using drugs. Advocates argue that the RAVE Act will ease what they see as an epidemic of ecstasy abuse. Opponents say the act is aimed at intimidating promoters, coercing them into not throwing parties at all.
Cracked Out
On a federal level, the hostility toward rave-style parties and their promoters has been building steadily. The Ecstasy Prevention Act, which passed through Congress last December, gives states financial incentives for passing ordinances restricting rave clubs and seizing land used for raves via nuisance laws.
But the RAVE Act is widely considered to be the government's most aggressive front so far toward club drugs and the party scene in general. That act expands the 1986 "crackhouse laws " to target promoters who "knowingly and intentionally" throw a party where drugs are present. The promoter, if convicted, can face exorbitant fines and up to 20 years in prison.
The crackhouse laws have been used in the past in attempts to shut down licensed parties, the most famous case being the federal government's investigation of the State Palace Theatre in New Orleans, site of a monthly rave that was infiltrated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in January of 2000. Undercover agents observed the use of glowsticks, pacifiers, massage tables, bottled water and an air conditioned "chill room." The DEA decided that these accessories were tantamount to drug paraphernalia, and the party's promoters were arrested.
The trial ended in a plea bargain. Barbecue of New Orleans, Inc., the company that had leased the theater for the party, was fined $100,000, and the judge ordered that "rave toys" be banned from the building. Also, any room kept 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the theatre was prohibited. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten called the plea "an immediate, tangible and long-lasting benefit to the welfare of local youth and the community as a whole."
But Letten's victory dance was a tad presumptuous. According to Rolling Stone, which ran the story under the headline "DEA Rave Bust Goes Bust," all charges against the promoters were dropped, the theater continues to hold raves to this day, not one actual drug bust was made and, two months later, a judge ruled that the banning of rave toys violates the First Amendment.
"The government cannot keep legal items out of places because of illegal activities they associate with those items," ruled Judge Thomas Porteous.
The DEA walked away with egg on its face, but that didn't stop it from trying again. In May of 2001, Club La Vela, the famous Panama City Beach site of MTV's Spring Break, was hauled into court under the crackhouse statute as well. Prosecutors presented the courtroom with Blow Pops and glowsticks as evidence of drug use in the club. It took the jury less than two hours to decide that Blow Pops are candy, not drug paraphernalia.
The government knew something had to be done. Arrests were being made but no one was doing any time. The dead busts were becoming a running joke and November elections were right around the corner. The DEA needed a loophole -- a way to make party promoters guilty by association.
Just Say Joe
Enter Senator Joe Biden, Democrat from Delaware and preeminent crusader in the War on Drugs. Currently, he serves as chair of both the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Caucus. He authored the law that established the nation's drug czar. In 1996, during a debate with Orrin Hatch, he insisted that "I'm the guy that suggested in the first national drug strategy that we get the military involved." He was a narc's wet dream.
Biden put together the bill called the RAVE Act. It cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last June with "congressional findings" that, according to the Washington Post, declare bottled water, chill rooms and glowsticks to be drug paraphernalia. It also retains the crackhouse law sentencing guidelines: Party organizers whose patrons get busted with drugs can face fines in the millions and up to 20 years in federal prison.
"The bill tailors the crackhouse statute to address rave promoters' actions more specifically so that Federal prosecutors will be able to use it to prosecute individuals who allow rampant drug use at their events and seek to profit from putting kids at risk," Biden said when he introduced the bill on June 18.
In an inexplicable bout of concern for the economic injustice of it all, Biden went on to chastise party organizers for charging "five to ten dollars" for bottled water.
Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), lead cosponsor of the bill, played the roll of Good Cop by promising in his own speech that "this legislation will not eliminate all raves" and that "innocent owners and proprietors will remain exempt from prosecution."
But critics of the bill have pointed out that its language leaves "innocent" wide open to interpretation. Mark Lee, promoter and manager of a gay party called Lizard Lounge in Washington, D.C., insists that "we are all liable under this act."
"Every type of event, venue and community fundraising event is going to be liable under targeted and selected prosecution," says Lee. "Senator Biden wants to suggest that [the RAVE Act] is limited to a certain type of event, but there is nothing in the bill that indicates that. It's left in the hands of local prosecutors across the country to determine who they're going to target."
The bill makes it a crime to "knowingly and intentionally" provide a space where drug use is occurring. But "knowingly and intentionally" is as specific as it gets, and because the bill specifies that glowsticks, massage oils, mentholated inhalers and chill rooms "enhance the effects of the drugs that patrons have ingested," prosecutors could argue that anyone throwing a party where these items are present knew about the presence of drugs. The promoters of the parties in New Orleans would have been easier to convict. Ditto the promoters of Washington, DC's recently defunct party, Buzz, which suffered eight drug busts on Sept. 13.
Ironically, the same day that those busts occurred, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was withdrawing his co-sponsorship of the RAVE Act. His reasons closely mirrored the concerns of promoters and party organizers -- that the bill's scope is too broad.
"A more narrowly crafted bill to target only unscrupulous promoters who are purposely holding events in order to profit from the illegal distribution of Ecstasy and other illegal drugs to young people would be preferable," he said in a statement.
Senator Biden's office dismisses such concerns.
"The vast majority of people promoting events out there will have nothing to fear from this bill," says Biden's Deputy Press Secretary Chip Unruh. "We don't think that the prosecution will be able to use our law willy-nilly to go after whoever they want."
Safety in Numbers
Inspiration for the bill came from a series of hearings on both the club drug phenomenon and on raves. Unruh says the legislation is aimed at combating Ecstasy use, "where it was taking place most often, and that happens to be at raves."
Minutes later, however, he appears to downplay the rave angle, insisting that "Senator Biden is not against electronic music" and that the bill's rave-specific name is incidental.
But Graham Boyd, Director of the Drug Policy Litigation Program at the ACLU, doesn't buy that defense.
"Freedom of speech covers music of any sort," says Boyd. "This bill selectively targets a particular kind of speech ... that the government apparently doesn't like. It becomes a tool for censorship."
Regardless, many expect the RAVE Act to cruise into law with little resistance. It contains the two sacred cows that legislators dare not desecrate: a heartfelt promise to Save The Children, and a steadfast commitment to Just Say No.
"For United States senators to come out against drug use by adolescents is the gold standard in politics these days," says Mark Lee.
The problem with that, according to many promoters, is that shutting down parties may have just the opposite effect. The scene will go underground into basements, parks and abandoned buildings, and the kids will follow.
"It's sad when every year we hear about a dozen or so deaths due to Ecstasy," says Amanda Huie, director of PR and marketing for Buzzlife Productions, which produced the Friday night Buzz party. "But the thought of two thousand people at a party at an underground warehouse with no air conditioning, no fire escapes, no sprinkler systems -- that terrifies me. This bill creates way more problems than it solves."
Even legal parties may decide to cut back on safety measures. Some fear that under the RAVE Act, so much as an ambulance kept onsite at a party could be used by prosecutors to insinuate that the promoter knew there were drugs present. Less medical personnel could equal less liability, and patrons' increased risk could mean the promoter's increased safety. Organizations like Dancesafe and the Responsible Party Movement, which provide information on drug use at raves, will effectively be banned from operating.
"The bill will prevent outreach programs that try to inform the public on the risks of drug use from getting into the venue," says Dancesafe executive director Tim Santamour.
The irony is that the federal government's own research has found that "mentions of club drugs are truly rare events" in emergency room visits, especially when compared to mentions of cocaine and alcohol-in-combination mentions.
The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), a program under the federal government's Department of Health and Human Services, found that only about 555,000 emergency room visits (out of 91 million total) were drug-related, and that of these drug-related cases, only about 1,665 involved Ecstasy or GHB.
In addition, the DAWN report found only 27 deaths involving MDMA between 1994 and 1999. The research team conceded that, "Due to the small number of deaths attributed to club drugs, no further analyses of these data were performed."
"Under ordinary circumstances, we would not report numbers this small," the team concluded. "They are reported here for two purposes: first, to calm speculation and second, to correct recent media errors related to these data."
A report by media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) alleges that the news media intentionally skew their findings for the sake of sensationalism and drama. For example, when newsmagazine program "60 Minutes II" cited DAWN statistics that attributed 1,100 hospital cases to Ecstasy abuse in the past few years, the program neglected to provide any proportional reference point -- for instance, that the same DAWN report showed Tylenol overdoses to be responsible for 20,000 hospital cases in 1998 alone.
Regardless, Unruh says that Biden decided to author the RAVE Act "because of what he was hearing from experts." The one group he mentioned specifically was the Partnership for a Drug Free America.
Unlike DAWN, a federal research organization dedicated to collecting data -- not advancing an interest -- the Partnership for a Drug Free America is a group with a self-proclaimed mission: to "help kids and teens reject substance abuse by influencing attitudes through persuasive information." The Partnership is not made up of health professionals -- it is a coalition of media, marketing and PR firms that can construct catchy ad campaigns. You may remember them from the 1980s, when they showed you Your Brain On Drugs.
Unruh says that Biden used this group's data when authoring the RAVE Act, citing their finding that "in the past three or four years, Ecstasy use has increased by over 71 percent."
While that figure may be true, it's extremely misleading. Actual trial use of Ecstasy by teens has only increased by five percent in the past few years -- from seven percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2001. The 71 percent figure represents the proportion of increase between seven and 12, not the actual increase of a mere five percent.
"What you're looking at with the RAVE Act is something that's trying to return the rave community to what it said it wanted in the first place: peace, love, unity and respect," says Howard Simon, assistant director of PR for the Partnership for a Drug Free America. "This is for people who want the music, want the dancing, want the community, and can hopefully have that in a drug-free atmosphere."
Simon's extremely diplomatic assertion reflects most pro-RAVE Act arguments: Drugs, not raves, are the enemy. The bill's advocates repeat this like a charmed incantation designed to ward off the ACLU. But however questionable the sincerity of middle-aged senators who claim to care about preserving rave culture, it's this appeal to civil liberties activists that makes the bill seem constitutional. It's also the reason why the RAVE Act will never work.
Proponents of the RAVE Act are, for the most part, not ravers. What they know of raves comes largely from studies and reports. So it's plausible that they could assume that extracting drugs from the rave scene is like slicing a bruised spot out of an apple. Ravers are always insisting that their scene is not all about drug use, so why can't it sally forth without its little pills?
The reason is that drugs are not a tidily packaged chunk that can be sliced out of the apple. They're more like the juice -- just one of the apple's many components, but a component that can't be removed without crushing the whole thing. Removing drugs from raves, and from American nightlife in general, is not possible -- not without a total revolution in the way people view their nocturnal social scene, and certainly not with a bill so stark and simplistic as the RAVE Act.
How has this obvious fact escaped advocates of the bill? It's tempting to suggest that it hasn't, that the RAVE Act's fans know exactly what such legislation would do to the nightlife scene, and that frankly, they don't care. This isn't the first time that the hawks in the War on Drugs have expected America's parties to sacrifice for their cause.
And because the RAVE Act is basically the War on Drugs brought down to a more focused level, it will fail in its goals just as the War on Drugs has, but in a more focused way. There are a few potential scenarios if the bill passes. One is that party promoters will be intimidated enough by the threat of prison to stop holding events. Another is that the law won't be enforced, instead becoming another unnoticed footnote collecting dust in a law book. A third is that the law will be used the way Biden's office says is intended -- that DEA will exercise restraint and use the bill to prosecute only the most egregious promoters.
"And there's no evidence that they've ever done that," warns Graham Boyd.
Though many originally expected the RAVE Act to sail through Congress unopposed, its opponents have managed to whip up enough controversy to perhaps stall the bill until next year. Bill Piper, Associate Director of National Affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, believes that activists have garnered enough opposition to the bill to raise a few eyebrows about its viability.
"When it was first introduced, everyone thought it was a slam dunk," says Piper. "But now you have a coalition of groups that have come out against the bill. Proponents probably aren't going to be able to bring it up as quickly in the Senate."
Piper believes that if the bill does not go to a vote before Congress recesses in October, Biden will try to get it through early next year. Either way, he too believes that the act will do little to curb Ecstasy use.
"It's like you're turning business owners into law enforcement officers. That's the job of the police. Promoters can't stop drug use any more effectively than the D.C. Police Department can, so why not go after the police for allowing drug use to happen? Or prisons? Or public schools? They all have patrons who use drugs too."
"My only regret in life is that i wasn't a DJ" Draz
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weba_d
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Australia
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Posted - 2002/10/22 : 21:05:46
Faaaaaaark.. thats relly ****ed hope u yankies can fight that off
the promoters of raves over there dont seem to popular?
I hope that never happends here.. but with the world goin how it is who knows what will happen
maybe Sadam will accidently spray mdma rain..lol!
"What goes up must come down...so keep popin!
WEBA D
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saintberry
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Australia
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Joined: Aug, 2002
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Posted - 2002/10/22 : 22:18:53
i dont think something like that could happen in aus....were not THAT right wing, yet
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gee
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Malaysia
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Joined: Oct, 2002
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Posted - 2002/10/22 : 23:14:57
I hope this doesn't happen in australia either.. like it or not drugs are a part of all aspects of life... I think it is very short minded to blankly associate them with rave parties... I believe people have a right to make up their own minds, and in saying that you take responsibility for those decisions. It is an extremist view to shut down dance parties on account that they promote drug abuse.. in my mind it is the over exaggerated, brainwashing media vehicles that have manifested this view in so many... monkey see monkey do as they say.
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one_scatterd_lil_monk_e
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Australia
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 00:20:19
yeah i hope that doesnt happen here , be in anycase if something like that did happen i wonder if they would shut down schools coz i swear i see more people abusing drugs there then anywhere else...
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toxic
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Australia
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 04:22:11
as long as it doesnt happen here
quote:
Originally posted by weba_d:
maybe Sadam will accidently spray mdma rain..lol!
one could only wish
Crack another one !!!
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Soren
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United States
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 04:58:03
Also note that D.A.W.N is a completely government sponsored agency. They ARE the government and they lie like bastages! The government goes to them and says "Hey, we need it proven that (Insert item here) kills everyone instantly. Go prove it now!" and then it's D.A.W.N.'s job to go prove that whatever does kill you. All their figures and stats are WAY blown up and completely false. Like initially the US gov said that there were like 4 MDMA deaths from 1985-1999 and then D.A.W.N got involved and the numbers went up to 27 from 1994-1999 or whatever. There have been many many independent agencies questioning the reality of their estimates and D.A.W.N has been found to be totally not credible on more than 1 occasion.
"You can use facts to prove anything"
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number2301
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Virgin Islands (US)
408 posts
Joined: Jul, 2002
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 09:44:56
God Bless America the land of the free. Yeah sure!
****ing facists. :(
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'Living in my world is easy, there is only peace, love and ... ecstacy'
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aznwasian
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United States
428 posts
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 15:14:49
Ok, what if someone took some x at save-on? Will they abolish save-on and hold them completely responsible? no.
damn im starting to hate the government.
¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.aZnWaSiAn.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯
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Xenochrome
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United States
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 Posted - 2002/10/23 : 15:38:42
What really gets to me is the way law enforcement agencies use the good intentions of rave/ club promoters against them.
Example:
Police will not let party be thrown unless undercover officers are admitted to sweep for drugs...then once drugs are found, the party is shut down as a "crackhouse"
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milo
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Canada
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 16:00:07
azn might be on to something, native americans get away with so much on their land, why dont' promoters start throwing parties there?
"Everybody... rock, rock on.. "
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Xenochrome
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United States
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 Posted - 2002/10/23 : 16:06:56
Hot Damn!!!
There's an idea!!!
It would really piss off the feds...and I'm sure that most Native Americans would be down with that!!! :P
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Brian K
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United States
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 16:28:11
haha that would be awesome, then the promoters could rake in extra money by puting slot machines at the party =P
i always wanted to play blackjack while listening to techno 
"Cuz I'm hardcore, heavyweight, magical man."
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Xenochrome
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United States
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 16:36:02
And the ravers could get their cigarettes for really cheap!
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kling27
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United States
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 Posted - 2002/10/23 : 17:21:19
well, it's like i always say. . .
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weba_d
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Australia
789 posts
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Posted - 2002/10/23 : 17:45:07
com on Sadam bust out some yummy chemical warfare!
MDMA RAIN! ;)
"what goes up must come down..so keep popin!
WEBA D
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