FEDERAL DRUG LAWS INVOKED AGAINST NEW ORLEANS RAVE PARTIES

New Orleans --- When rave parties --- all-night high-energy dance bashes
sprang up in this city in the mid-1990s, it seemed as if a new
generation of partyers had settled in a town famous for its annual Mardi
Gras revelry.

But rave's days may be numbered in this city. In January, drug enforcement
agents indicted three men who organized a series of rave parties. Officers
charged them under the federal ''crack house'' law that makes it a crime to
allow a building to be used for illegal drugs, in this case usually Ecstasy
and LSD.

A trial is scheduled for late March, but it may be postponed after the
defense filed a motion last week to dismiss the charges. That motion
requests a hearing in late March as well.

Police say they were alerted to the parties' dangers by hundreds of youths
who have had medical treatment for overdoses since raves came to New
Orleans. From high-priced bottles of water for dehydrated partyers to
cool-down rooms for kids suffering from Ecstasy-related overheating, police
say the parties were designed with drug use in mind.

''The purpose was to shut down the operation so that all illegal activity
going on would stop,'' said Arthur Hitchins, spokesman for the Drug
Enforcement Administration's New Orleans field division. ''The whole rave
idea or party scene at that place was about a drug party.''

DJ James Estopinal, known to electronic music fans as ''Disco Donnie,'' and
brothers Brian Brunet and Robert Brunet, who operate the State Palace,
where raves were held, face maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and
$500,000 in fines if convicted.

Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Policy
Litigation Project, said the case represents a marked difference at the
DEA, which historically has arrested dealers and grabbed drugs as they were
being imported into the United States.

''They're not doing that with Ecstasy,'' he said. ''They're going after the
rave scene under the mistaken belief that electronic music is equivalent to
Ecstasy and by eliminating electronic music they can eliminate Ecstasy.''

Starting with the ''speakeasies'' in the 1920s that were associated with
then-illegal alcohol, many music genres have been associated with illegal
substances. But that doesn't mean the organizers are responsible, said
Arthur Lemann, a New Orleans lawyer who is defending Brian Brunet.

''It's like, 'Let's arrest the usher because Pavarotti stabs the fat lady
at the end of the opera,' '' he said. ''It's absurd.''

That the DEA is prosecuting this case, said Boyd of the ACLU, makes stadium
owners who organize music events nervous, because they wonder whether the
agency would prosecute stadium owners, for instance, if someone inside were
smoking marijuana.