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DanceSafe is teaming up with ID&T’s TomorrowWorld to provide harm reduction and outreach services to the guests at the upcoming festival. TomorrowWorld, a spinoff of Belgium’s Tomorrowland, will take place in Chattahoochee, Georgia this weekend from Friday, September 27th to Sunday, September 29th. The partnership represents the first time DanceSafe will work with a major event promoter. Although DanceSafe will not have a drug testing station at the festival because of TomorrowWorld's strict zero tolerance policy for drugs, there will be a booth with free non-biased literature, earplugs, condoms, water, and on site peer education. Testing kits are available on their website.
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Thump recently spoke to Carissa, one of the DanceSafe organizers, to learn more about the group, the impact of the Rave Act on electronic dance music culture, and what the organization has encountered since its inception in 1999. Carissa makes an interesting observation about what drugs are actually out there based on the consistent results of tests done with DanceSafe. “Today Molly is questionable – it can be any number of different drugs, because anyone can put anything into a capsule and tell you it’s Molly. You never really know what it is till you test it! Most of the time when we test Molly it is not MDMA.”
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When asked what the “Molly” they've tested actually contains, she answers, “Mostly cathinones . . . MDVP, BK-MDMA, methylone, butylone, mephedrone are all cathinones. They are also called “bath salts” by the media but I am not a fan of slang terms for drugs.”
She blames the diminishing number of DanceSafe tables at events on the United States’ 2003 RAVE Act. “In the beginning we had chapters everywhere. But after all of the RAVE Act stuff went down, promoters were scared to have us at their events because they thought by having us there it meant there was drug use going on . . . The whole industry seemed to die down after the RAVE Act but now it’s back and bigger than ever.”
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She then explains how drugs have become more and more adulterated since DanceSafe first started testing pills in 1999. “Back then it was very rare for me to do a test and have it not come up as a positive for MDMA. At one point I remember thinking that my testing kit wasn’t working correctly! All the MDMA capsules we tested were always sketchy. And now it’s capsules everywhere and hardly positive tests for MDMA. Bath salts all day! Scary. Almost half of people we surveyed last summer said that they had taken something that they had no idea what it was.”
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It is a shame that more festivals and events haven’t embraced DanceSafe’s willingness to make their events safer for free, and the partnership with TomorrowWorld represents a step in the right direction. Perhaps this is a much more realistic approach in reducing harm than banning substances all together like the uninformed Mother’s Against Molly campaign and petition.
Read the full interview with Carissa here.
