SHAMBHALA MORE THAN A PARTY

For Warren Michelow, the Shambhala Music Festival in Salmo last week
was more than just a giant party, it was a research environment.

Michelow is a PhD student in public health (epidemiology) at
University of B.C. His thesis work is on the patterns and health
outcomes of multiple drugs in a rave, music festival setting.

"The problem with a lot of drug research is not knowing the size of
the population you're drawing a sample from; so, there is no
denominator for statistics," Michelow explained. "At Shambhala we
know how many people are here, so we can get a sense of how this
population behaves."

Michelow hired a team of professional researchers to administer
surveys to more than 300 people at the festival. They found people
when they were relaxing on the site and asked for their voluntary
participation in the study.

The surveys were completely anonymous and participants weren't paid
or otherwise reimbursed.

They answered questions about how they spent the last 24-hour period:
When they slept, when they danced, and most importantly for the
research, when they used drugs and how they combined the drugs they did use.

Drug use was not a prerequisite of involvement in the survey and
researchers found many respondents hadn't used drugs at all during
the 24-hour period prior to doing the survey, or they had only used
alcohol or marijuana.

While Michelow hasn't analyzed the data yet, skimming through the
surveys showed significant trends.

Surveys were collected each day of the festival and Michelow easily
noticed a significant trend of increasingly harder drug use as the
festival continued. While a majority reported being sober or just
drinking alcohol in the 24-hour period before the first day of the
festival, the combination of pot and alcohol took over popularity as
the festival began to get underway and in the later days a majority
of respondents reported using illicit drugs other than marijuana.

"It shows that people are pacing themselves," Michelow said. "What
may look like reckless behaviour is actually planned and thought-out
in this setting."

Michelow said people at Shambhala prefer shorter acting drugs, such
as cocaine or ketamine, over longer acting drugs such as LSD.

"They want to stay in control of their experience, adding a little
more as they need it," Michelow said.

This information is useful in the context of harm prevention and
adapting strategies to encourage responsible drug use.

Michelow said while a lot of drug use research focuses on a specific
substance or outcome (for example, how injection drug use contributes
to the spread of HIV) recreational drug users are an understudied population.

But it's a population Michelow has spent a lot of time working with.
He has run The Sanctuary, a safe space at Shambhala, for five years.
Over the course of the festival well over 1,000 people come through
the sanctuary, and about 200 of those are looking for assistance from
the volunteers because they've used too many drugs.

"We try to help those people have a positive, constructive experience
on the drugs they've used," Michelow said. "They should be able to
gain something from the experience and enjoy it."

His research, which is funded by the Centre for Addictions Research
of B.C., will inform harm reduction efforts like these for other
festivals and events, as well as drug use prevention campaigns.

He plans to write at least three papers on his research in the next
year, as well as provide reports on the findings to the organizers of Shambhala.