HOW TO RADICALIZE A GENERATION

Toronto ravers are trying to be so reasonable.

They have worked with City Council to draft the Protocol for the
Operation of Safe Dance Events. The Toronto Dance Safety Committee has
tried to make sure paramedic teams are at all the big parties.

And this week, at the inquiry into the death of 20-year-old Allan Ho,
ravers are explaining that the primary cause of ecstasy-related death
is dehydration. Therefore, they say, most of the risk from the drug
can be eliminated at raves simply by making sure there is unlimited
access to water and proper ventilation.

What the ravers are only just beginning to understand is that none of
this matters. The rave uproar, like all drug wars, isn't about safety,
it's about politics. It's about the fact that a lot of parents don't
understand their own kids: the way they dress, the music they listen
to, the thing with the pacifier lollipops.

Which provides a great political opportunity for Toronto Police Chief
Julian Fantino to step up for National Daddy Duty -- to claim he knows
exactly what those sinister lollipops and teddy-bear backpacks are all
about. Drugs and violence, that's what. The only solution is to shut
them down.

Kim Stanford, a registered nurse and chair of the Toronto Dance Safety
Committee, has tried to counter this fear-mongering with reasoned
statistics: Of Ontario's nine ecstasy-related deaths last year, only
three were clearly associated with raves. Others point out that there
were 6,503 alcohol-related deaths in Canada in 1995 (a stat overlooked
by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps when she held up a Molson commercial
as an example of our proud national identity).

Although Chief Fantino has done his best to toss shootings at
after-hours clubs into his anti-rave crusade, Ms. Stanford and others
have countered that these incidents did not take place at raves, but
at private clubs. Ecstasy, as anyone who has seen its effects in
action can attest, is a love drug. Its users are more likely to be
guilty of cloying hugging than handgun offences.

The ravers have also patiently explained that, if you ban a scene of
50,000 people, it won't go away, it will go underground, back to the
bad old days of no running water and suffocating ventilation. Since
none of these arguments have had any effect, perhaps it's time for a
new tactic. A similar scenario unfolded in Britain when the Tory
government passed the Criminal Justice Act in 1994. The act became
known as the anti-rave law because, by giving police new powers to
break up parties and arrest those in attendance, it effectively made
raves illegal.

But it also did something else: It took an apolitical party scene and
turned it into a political movement.

When the Criminal Justice Act was introduced, British ravers got
organized. They formed key alliances with other political
constituencies who were facing fierce crackdowns by the state:
anarchists getting thrown out of their squats, homeless people barred
from panhandling, the radical eco-warriors who were trying to prevent
forests from being paved over by new highways.

Together, they began to develop an overarching analysis about the loss
of non-commercial, public space -- to live, plant gardens, go to
school, have parties. Out of this oddball coalition of hedonists,
artists, environmentalists and students, a vibrant new political
movement emerged: Reclaim the Streets.

Since 1995, RTS has been throwing impromptu street parties in the
middle of busy intersections all over London, some of them 20,000
strong. The more traditional activists brought an analysis about the
need for public space for purely public purposes; the ravers brought
club-quality sound systems and a sense of abandon.

The RTS phenomenon has spread around the world, including to several
cities in Canada, most recently on May Day. The parties have been
enormously controversial in Europe because they often turn into
full-scale anti-capitalism riots, a fact that might be of interest to
Chief Fantino and his get-tough plans.

Already, you can see it happening in Ontario. Just to defend itself
from attacks, the ad-hoc, splintered rave scene has been forced to
organize itself into a unified political lobby. Suddenly, the event
promoters, independent record labels and trendy clothing companies
that make up the scene aren't just party hedonists: They are employers
of Canada's youth, part of Ontario's tourism industry, world-class
artists.

Sometimes, it takes an organized attack to find out who you really are
- -- and who your allies are. As in Britain, Toronto's ravers are
quickly discovering that they have lots of company of the wrong side
of the law-and-order divide. There are squeegee kids, homeless people
and, most recently, high-school students with no allegiance to the
Queen.

Is Chief Fantino inadvertently running a recruitment drive for the
young anarchists of Toronto? Maybe. After all, the reason Reclaim the
Streets hasn't taken off in Canada like it has in Britain is that
Canada's youth didn't wake up one morning to learn they had been
reclassified as dangerous criminals. Until now, that is.