RAVE ON AT CLUB SENATE

The RAVE Act Seeks To Shut Down Dance Events And Prosecute Everyone Involved

The poor American rave scene. Even those not attracted to all-night dance
fests, drum and bass thumping or bright, baggy pants have got to sympathize
with the ravers, the DJs, the promoters and the club owners subjected to
such constant heat. Not since the advent of the hippie movement has law
enforcement taken such a disliking to a music scene, capitalizing on
Ecstasy use as the greatest evil the drug culture has yet seen and casting
everything associated with raves--from glow sticks, to pacifiers, bottled
water to blow pops--in a sinister light.

Having failed in the past to effectively land any promoters or owners
behind bars, the Drug Enforcement Agency has found a few avid supporters in
Congress to make their rave arrests stick.

Cleverly titled the RAVE (Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy)
Act, this bill seeks to modify the 1986 "crackhouse law" to prosecute any
employee of any club where someone is caught doing a drug. The language is
broad enough to trap anyone in its net, inclusive enough to target such
accoutrements as "over-priced bottles of water," "'chill rooms'," and "neon
glow sticks," and the bill is serious enough to bring federal
charges--$250,000 or more in fines and jail time. Simply put, the RAVE Act
could shut down the safe electronic scene for good, shoving it back into
the illegal factories where ambulances don't stand at the ready and drug
use is not monitored at all.

"If it's forced back underground, there's not going to be police, there's
not going to be the insurance, there's not going to be safety measures,"
says Sarah Ficca, a.k.a. Madame Buddafly, a New Haven-based DJ who makes a
living spinning records. "It's going to be back in the factories, and the
DJs will be less inclined to treat it as a business," she says.

Sponsored by Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs members Dick Durbin (D-IL),
Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the
bill is considered so uncontroversial that it quickly passed the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Now they are trying to pass the RAVE Act under
"unanimous consent rules," meaning it would be passed without a roll-call vote.

"That's generally for non-controversial items like declaring a certain week
to be National Broccoli Week," says Graham Boyd, director of the Drug
Policy Litigation Project with the national American Civil Liberties Union.
The senators, he says, "didn't realize the implications, which is that
instead of targeting drug users, the bill targets music, dance and other
activities protected by the First Amendment. It also targets legitimate
businesses." Thanks to the ACLU, the federal court ruled that glow sticks,
pacifiers, Vicks VapoRub and flashing lights did not constitute "drug
paraphernalia."

The Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund (EM:DEF), a non-profit
group based in California, has been fighting these targeted attacks by law
enforcement and federal agents for years, trying to protect industry
professionals and educate the public about electronic events.

Gary Blitz, coordinator for EM:DEF, sees the RAVE bill as a blatant ploy to
corral tax dollars.

"The national youth anti-drug media campaign came up for renewal," says
Blitz. "They need a crisis to rally behind [to] ask for more money." The
proposal for the bill reaches into elaborate explanations about Ecstasy
use, claiming that, "Because rave promoters know that Ecstasy causes the
body temperature in a user to rise and as a result causes the user to
become very thirsty, many rave promoters facilitate and profit from
flagrant drug use. . . by selling over-priced bottles of water." It goes on
to add, "Ecstasy mentions in emergency visits grew 1,040 percent between
1994 and 1999." That percentage sounds sensational, says Blitz, because it
tells only a partial story.

"A lot of the different counties, police departments and states haven't put
questions about MDMA into their surveys until recently," says Blitz. "If
you go from not even having a question on a survey, and it goes from no
cases to a hundred, that's a [huge] increase." When compared with other
drug-related emergency visits, MDMA is hardly a top contender. "The rave
culture is an easy target because it doesn't have the corporate
underpinnings and backing that some of the other festivals do."

If the federal government is truly interested in preventing drug use, Blitz
and other electronic music supporters believe in working with the venue
owners to provide emergency vehicles, police events and prosecute those who
are using and selling drugs.

"Stopping raves and shutting down clubs doesn't work," says Matt Hanrahan,
a promoter with Kingsize USA Inc., a New York-based promotion company that
sponsors dance events as well as jazz, reggae, rock, hip-hop and others.
"Kids will find something new and probably worse to take and new and
unregulated venues to party at."

"A good club owner is one that provides a chill room and provides water,"
says Boyd of the ACLU, "because those are both measures which greatly
reduce the chances of someone dying from Ecstasy. This bill does the
opposite. If you provide an air-conditioned room and water, that's a sign
that you know people are using Ecstasy and you can be punished for it. It's
completely counter-productive."