PARTIERS SERIOUS ABOUT SAFE FUN

For Warren Michelow and his friends, planning to spend the night at a rave
was like planning a camping trip. Always packing plenty of food, toys,
sweets, and water, his crew travelled with the essentials for a safe night
of dancing and potential drug use at Vancouver's warehouse parties of the
late 1990s.

"As part of our intention of having a good time or being good ravers, we'd
take care of the other people there. There was a consciousness of being
aware that people were hydrated and people were taking care of themselves,"
Michelow, 41, says. "If people were in distress, we wouldn't just look on
and move on; we'd go and get involved if someone looked like they needed help."

Beyond supplying water, back rubs, and body tickles to random ravers,
Michelow educated himself on the various uses and effects of drugs that
were popular at the time--ecstasy (MDMA), mushrooms, and acid--and
implemented an informal harm-reduction approach to caring for those in his
late-night community.

Drawing on his background in AIDS outreach that started some 20 years
earlier when he started the first gay-rights organization in apartheid-era
Johannesburg, and his more recent work with the BC Persons With Aids
Society and AIDS Vancouver, Michelow recognized the parallels between
safer-sex education and the potential for peer education on the rave scene.

"Everything was defined in terms of these massive polarities: if you
weren't 100 percent safe, then you might as well forget it because you were
a goner. It struck me that it never took into account the messiness of
being human and the messiness of human situations," he says.

Keen to get more involved, in 1998, Michelow approached a DanceSafe booth
at an outdoor party. The table of the now-defunct Vancouver chapter of the
rave-outreach organization was staffed by Ken Tupper, and after the two
exchanged e-mails, Tupper invited Michelow to attend a meeting of another
peer-education organization, MindBodyLove.

Started by ex-Ontarians Kenn Quayle and Brian Mackenzie in 1995,
MindBodyLove (www.mindbodylove.org/) is the West Coast progression of
Quayle's Toronto Raver Information Project, a successful raver-run
initiative promoting safer sex and drug use. The mind-body-love triad is
based on a yoga tradition of holistic health and well-being, as well as
Quayle's background in HIV education and Mackenzie's in social ecology.

"The idea we had was to go beyond just addressing harm-reduction issues to
addressing more spiritual and community-building potential in the rave
scene," Mackenzie, 31, says on the phone from his home on the Sunshine Coast.

The duo went to work in Vancouver's rave community, setting up tables and
handing out drug-information pamphlets from the Addiction Research
Foundation, and they went on to present the MindBodyLove perspective at the
XI International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver in 1996 and the
eighth-annual Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm, in Paris,
in 1997. Shortly thereafter, they entrusted MBL to its long-standing
volunteers before leaving for Australia, where they spent four years
continuing their harm-reduction work.

Faced with a variety of challenges in recent years, the remaining members
of MindBodyLove have had to change tack. Moving away from one-on-one peer
outreach, they are now focusing on making an impact through influencing
policy. Pill-testing at rave parties has had a lot to do with this shift.
"We were doing a sort of 'Don't ask, don't tell' sort of thing for a
while," explains Tupper, 33, who recently earned an MA in education at
Simon Fraser University, where he researched the shamanistic and
ritualistic uses of mind-altering plants. "Then it was, you know, 'If you
do this, then we're going to arrest you for trafficking.' That was when we
stopped."

Pill-testing involves taking a minute scraping of a drug tablet and adding
a chemical reagent, which reacts with the sample to produce a variety of
different colours, indicating the presence of amphetamines,
methamphetamines, and/or opiates. For MBL, the value is twofold.

"If there's bad stuff going around at a party, pill-testing provides just a
chance to catch it," Michelow says. "The very fact that we are testing for
E raises in people's minds the question of, 'Do I know what I'm taking?'
Most important is that by putting up a funky-looking table and offering
something as out-there as 'We'll test your E pill,' it attracts people, and
once we've got people who have come up to the table, we can engage them in
a dialogue."

Cpl. Scott Rintoul of the RCMP's Drug Awareness Program disagrees. "The
pill-testing is, well, first of all it's illegal," the five-year veteran of
the DAP says. "One of the biggest reasons, say the toxicologists, is that
on-site pill-testing is nothing more than a field test. It is a reagent
that they are using called sulphuric acid, which only reacts with some
compounds, and there are unknowns that go along with that."

Rintoul says the inability of the test to detect drug concentrations or
purity, and its failure to indicate the presence of several potentially
harmful chemicals, such as PCP, ketamine, and PMA, are alarming. "Because
of these problems, we are suggesting that the test kits give the user a
false sense of security and that can cause more harm than the test kit itself."

Local club promoter Arpy Dragffy sees the potential for both benefit and
harm. "I guess from a partygoer perspective and such, you always wanted to
know if there was something dangerous happening that maybe you weren't
aware of, if there was something, you know, to be worried about," the
23-year-old says. "There were always these little scares that you heard of,
little myths about certain colours of pills being bad and stuff. From
another perspective, though, a lot of young people go to those tables to
justify their use."

After a standoff between rave promoters, private security companies, and
the police over the liabilities involved in on-site pill-testing, MBL
abandoned its tables, switched the focus to policymaking, and is currently
working on establishing youth outreach in schools and community centres,
like the newly opened Placebo centre on the East Side (101-1183 Odlum
Drive, 604-215-0069; www.placebo1183.ca/). In November 2002, MindBodyLove
members took part in a workshop with Rintoul and 120 others, sharing
information about methamphetamines and their increasing popularity and
availability. Most recently, Quayle and Mackenzie finished a project for
the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority on substance use in the queer community.

Although now removed from the scene that inspired him to become active in
rave-drug education, Michelow remains as empathetic now as he was when he
travelled with a backpack full of goodies and danced all night.

"Being able to educate others and being able to influence policy
development and the development of programs and venues as such that we can
continue to work toward improving the health of the community is the focus
now," he says. "The people in this community are our friends, they are the
people we love, they are the people we love to party with."