Here Are the Drugs Americans Did in 2016.

By Terry Gotham

Every 3 months, the DEA releases the “Emerging Threat Report.” This document catalogs the various substances that have been seized and analyzed by the DEA over a 3 month period. Every year, the DEA compiles that data into an annual report, which in my opinion, is the best window into the drug taking habits of Americans available anywhere. The 2016 results are in, and I have to tell you, it isn’t pretty.

2016 was a fentanyl jamboree folks. While in years past, we’ve dealt with “bath salts” and N-Bomb and Flakka, these substances didn’t seem to be growing in popularity this year.  The chart above is pulled directly from the DEA report and breaks down the most popular emerging opioids & pain meds. 70% of the identifications were fentanyl, which means that 7 out of every 10 opioid drugs seized was fentanyl. What’s even more terrifying is the sheer number of fentanyl analogues that were discovered in drug seizures. As my regular readers know, the adulterant problem in the recreational drug taking community becomes fatal once opioids are stepped on with fentanyl. 42% of fentanyl seizures test for fentanyl and heroin, which indicates that more and more users are getting fentanyl in addition to heroin. It’s becoming more likely to encounter multiple types of fentanyl over the course of your use. That is a whirlwind of risk for dependent or recreational users. 9 of the 15 opioid substances identified (60%) were identified for the first time. To reiterate, there are 9 totally new fentanyl analogues in the wild that our EMTs, emergency medical staff & even toxicologists have little to no experience with.

I can’t make it any more clear than that folks. Fentanyl is being found routinely with cocaine & meth. That whole “why would dealers mix uppers & downers” question can be put to rest. It’s happening, and it’s happening so often, it’s classed as a “routine” occurrence by law enforcement.

Next up, the synthetic cannabinoids. The two most popular fake pot offerings, FUB-AMB & 5F-UR-144 accounted for 34% of the identifications. Yes, those are the names of the two most popular new drugs people are smoking when they want to get high and don’t want to smoke cannabis. The long tail of synthetic cannabinoids has grown over the last couple of years, but only 3 of the 37 different substances identified in 2016 were totally novel. This could be an indication that novel synthetic cannabinoids are not being developed because of market saturation or due to recent emergency scheduling, but we don’t have good data on preferences between synthetic cannabinoid brands or why some die out while others flourish.

Cathinones are following predictable if not slightly heartening paths. While we are still seeing a significant number of them in seizures & identifications, only 5 of the 24 substances were novel. Dibutylone, Ethylone, Methylone, a-PVP, and 4-MEC make expected chart appearances, but the novel drugs on the chart are interesting. 4-CEC, 3-CMC, 3-MEC are chemical analogues of 4-MEC, which is known as “second-generation” mephedrone. 4-methoxy-a-PV8 and 4-fluro-a-PHP are the next iterative cycle after a-PVP. These novel cathinones are entirely analogues of drugs that have been scheduled in the last 6 years. You can almost set your watch to it. And now, for something completely different.

Three. That’s it. 1 identification of 2C-B & two iterations of the problematic NBOMe substance that scared the hell out of us a few years ago. To me, this is an encouraging sign that the kids are alright. If fewer people are doing NBOMe because the community recognized the risk it posed  and rejected it, that could be startlingly strong evidence that harm reduction works. If lethal chemicals are not supported within a community to the point where they don’t have a market, as no hippie wants to go to jail for selling a drug you can die from taking, then that means something is getting through.

It’s important to stress, all of these numbers could be grossly under-counting the true depth of fentanyl analogue and novel psychoactive substance proliferation. This data is generated from the substances that have been both seized and analyzed in a timely manner. Even the DEA doesn’t have enough funding to test everything being seized, and of course, there could be analogues or novel substances that simply haven’t been seized by law enforcement or documented by clinicians or recreational users. To put what we know in perspective, I’ll go to the DEA’s words themselves:

There were 21 substances reported for the first time in CY 2016, meaning they have not been encountered for at least the last two years. This equates to one new substance approximately every two and a half weeks.
~DEA Emerging Threat Report 2016

Ultimately, the data presented here by the DEA itself, supports the hypothesis that the War on Drugs creates more dangerous drugs, especially opioids. Pain medication users can’t afford prescription meds and heroin is has become problematic to import. So, dealers just make their own opiates or import a novel analogue of fentanyl to pass off as heroin for your clients. Fast forward a couple of years and we’ve got the overdose crisis plaguing most states. The iteration on a-PVP & 4-MEC/mephedrone is in direct response to laws passed in this decade. Those drugs would likely not be in circulation to the volume required to end up in a seizure without their precursors being scheduled. That’s the main thing I’d really like anyone still reading to take away from this: None of these drugs being consumed in the vast quantities that they are, would be ,if drugs that are already illegal, weren’t. If you are willing to stop you addiction from any drug buy kratom online and get what you desire.

Of course heroin would still cause overdoses, and people abusing psychomotor stimulants would have problems if drugs were legal. To say otherwise would be impudent & myopic. But, as I illustrated previously, hospital & ER staff had a pretty good handle on how to take care of heroin/morphine/prescription painkiller overdoses. How many emergency workers do you know that have ever heard of 4-CEC or a-PHP? Exactly. One crucial benefit from decriminalizing or legalizing hard drugs is that we’ll have a much cleaner substance pool for recreational users to draw from. This will return us to a careflow that is familiar and scaleable. No hospital has the resources to keep up with 9 new fentanyl analogues a year, and if TrumpCare passes, it will be even more difficult.

The Anti-Burning Man

The New York Times has a story about the Bombay Beach Bienalle at the Salton Sea in California.

They just had the first one, seems like it was a hit. Art, opera, and weirdness: sign me up.

The Times have coined it the Anti-Burning Man.

Last weekend, a mostly abandoned town on the Salton Sea was transformed into a pageantry of art and opera and weirdness.

The three-day Bombay Beach Biennale was free to attend, unpublicized and driven by a mission of local engagement.

Call it the anti-Burning Man.

The idea came from Tao Ruspoli, a Los Angeles filmmaker, who years ago became fascinated by the Salton Sea, a onetime tourist mecca straddling the Imperial and Coachella Valleys that has succumbed to environmental decay.

He started visiting often and even bought a house in Bombay Beach, a speck of a town on the eastern shore.

“This idea of Bombay Beach Biennale popped in my head because rather than play up the sadness of the place,” he said, “I thought it would be more interesting to play on the surrealness of the place…It’s such a mixture of contradictions, of natural and unnatural, of beautiful and ugly.”

[Source]

Forget Leave No Trace. These artists want to leave it better:

Mr. Ruspoli partnered with two friends, Stefan Ashkenazy, an art lover and hotelier, and Lily Johnson White, a philanthropist and member of the Johnson & Johnson family.

Last year, the trio self-funded the inaugural festival, under the theme “Decay,” and invited artists, philosophers, writers and other assorted merrymakers from their network of friends to join. It was a hit.

But rather than simply clear out once the fun was over, the festival has aimed to reinvent some of the abandoned buildings in town as permanent art spaces.

“The ethos is to be playful but also leave a lasting impact to the town,” Mr. Ruspoli said.

[Source]

The Johnson (and Johnson) family are full of interesting characters, to put it mildly.

crazy rich

Stefan Ashkenazy is the owner of La Petit Ermitage, one of the commercial hotels doing pop-ups at Burning Man VIP camps.

petit ermitage

And as for the third player in this trinity, the description of “film maker” doesn’t quite do him justice:
Tao Ruspoli is an Italian American filmmaker, photographer, and musician. Ruspoli is the second son of occasional actor and aristocrat Prince Alessandro Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri and Austrian-American actress Debra Berger. He is the older brother of Bartolomeo dei Principi Ruspoli, second husband of oil heiress Aileen Getty.
A prince(ling), whose sister-in-law is a Getty. No big deal. Oh and he got engaged to Olivia Wilde at Burning Man and married her at 18 on a school bus
olivia wilde tron
The Salton Sea is a seriously trippy place.

This year the Biennale theme was The Way The Future Used To Be. There were more than 100 artists and performers, with attendance “in the hundreds rather than thousands”.

Carmiel Banasky in LA Weekly described the psychedelic space station and other accoutrements:

My first stop at the fest was a Mad Hatter-esque tea party, where cake pops (made by a local family), joints and edibles were passed around while fairy women made bondage art in the branches. Along the beach was a lifeguard stand turned into a psychedelic space station. Colorful smoke bombs set off at sunset through large sea creature cut-outs asked us to remember where we were, while the outdoor bar next door (tended by men in yellow bikini briefs) asked us to forget it.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Read the LA Weekly Story

See more photos on Instagram

An art installation on the sand at Bombay Beach. Credit: Jennifer Wiley
Photo

Artists explored the surreal setting of the decaying Salton Sea. Credit: Laura Austin
Photo

Men in yellow bikini briefs tended a bar at the Bombay Beach Club. Credit: James Frank
Films were screened at a drive-in theater featuring the shells of broken-down cars. Credit: James Frank
A performance at the Bombay Beach Opera House featured dancers from the San Francisco Ballet. Credit: James Frank

Thought Police: Don’t Call It A Festival

thought-police-framed-poster_24x36_wall_mockup_grande

thought policeYet another preachy Burnier-Than-Thou post at the BJ telling Burners they’re doing it wrong.

For all the things that Burning Man certainly is, one that mindful Burners will vigilantly note that Burning Man is not, is a festival.

The word “festival” encompasses a lot of ideas (film festivals, music festivals, taco festivals etc.) but usually it expresses a period of celebration. Burning Man contains some of the same ingredients, but it’s a totally different recipe. At Burning Man an effigy is raised and eventually burned, but the experience is accompanied as much by tears as by laughter.

Do we celebrate at Burning Man? Absolutely. Ask any Burner why they’re involved, though, and their response will often sound much more purposeful, like you might expect from a teenager running away to join the circus or a monk on a pilgrimage in a foreign land.

[Source]

Barf. Hate to break it to you, BMorg, but not everybody goes to Burning Man because they want to be a monk on a pilgrimage. Some go to have a great time, that is: entertainment. That is the product that is being offered here.

Hey, if the culture is suffering, it couldn’t be because of Caravansicle or VIP tickets or all the cool celebrities and 100+ licensed vendors on the Playa, or the luxury chopper flights for the Sheriff’s family to 18 course dinners, or BMorg starting their own private airline. These are all important parts of a circus for teenage runaways radical self-reliance and civic responsibility.

Cultural challenges can’t be because of the founders starting to celebrate their 70th birthdays. And there’s no way that a year-round organization of more than 100 full time staff dedicated to spreading the culture could be doing a bad job, because they all got together at Esalen and the GLC and told each other how great they are in a group hug. So that only leaves one group left to blame. We, The Burners. And if we could all just stop calling it a festival, then we wouldn’t have to radically include so many of those gosh darned ravers!

black rock helicopter da vinci

burner air express helicopter

Friends don’t let friends call Burning Man a festival? If that is true, then it proves that BMorg is no friend to Burning Man. Here’s their web site:

Screenshot 2017-04-12 09.59.27.png

“Burning Man isn’t your usual festival”. Makes is sound like it’s a festival, albeit an unusual one.

Here’s the trademark, part of the actual ownership of Burning Man which the founders did not transfer into the non-profit structure, instead creating a new company which earns revenues from licensing Burning Man’s intellectual property that they ironically named Decommodification, LLC.

Screenshot 2017-04-12 10.02.21

[Source]

That sure makes it sound like an art festival (with live entertainment). Seems pretty clear.

Burning Man’s press kit in 1995 described it thus:

an arts festival, a ritual sacrifice, a spiritual quest, and a post-modern carnival of the absurd” [Source: Burning Man archives, Bancroft Library]

This is also how it was seen by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the charity non-profit pre-cursor to the Burning Man Project of today:

Screenshot 2017-04-12 15.37.41

Here’s Burning Man founder/owner Danger Ranger calling it a festival on their board of directors page at burningman.org:

Screenshot 2017-04-12 14.16.09.png

[Source]

And while we’re talking about the Board, we also have Burning Man Project Director Chip Conley and his site Fest300, which tracks the top 300 festivals in the world. Not only is Burning Man a permanent feature in this list, but so are several of its regional subsidiaries. If you look at the mix of the content on the site, Burning Man certainly gets far more coverage at this festival site run by a Burning Man director than any of the other 299 festivals.

In the original August 15, 1994 partnership agreement between Larry Harvey, John Law and Michael Mikel to form Paperman LLC and operate a business under the name Burning Man with its principal place of business in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, it is specifically called a festival:

[Source: Case 3:07-cv-00134-WHA Document 15-1 ]

In 1994, they had no problem making net profit from the sale of the Burning Man Festival videos:

Here’s some bragging from BM founder Harley Dubois that she knows a thing or two about how festivals run. Presumably completely irrelevant experience to Burning Man, since it’s not a festival. So why bother even mentioning it in the BJ?

As founder of Burning Man’s Community Services Department, she knows a thing or two about how festivals run…

“What a treat to be invited to Boom to sit on a panel with founders from other festivals.” [Source]

That sure sounds to me like someone who sees themselves as a founder of a festival.

A search for “festival” on Burning Man’s web site turns up 1130 articles. Sure, there are a few saying “we’re not a festival”, but that seems to be a more recent development.

Screenshot 2017-04-12 14.19.16.png

You can also read about the Burning Man festival in their academics and books about Burning Man sections.

For many years they have had no issues with Burning Man being described as a festival in TIME, Dezeen, Wikipedia, Bloomberg, NPR, Stubhub, ABC News, The Atlantic, Hollywood ReporterWall Street Journal , Washington Post, the New York Times…it would be easy to find more, but I think I’ve made my point.

Conclusion

It’s either

a) all these sources, including respected media publications, the founders and legal documents like the trademark registration, are in error and it’s not a festival. In which case Chip Conley needs to do the right thing and remove all references to Burning Man from his Fest300 site. Burning Man themselves need to say “it’s not a festival” on their web site, instead of “it’s not your usual festival”, and submit a new trademark application.

Or,

b) of course it’s a fucking festival. It’s a huge fuck-off party in the desert, with tons of stereo equipment and lasers and glowy shit. In which case this latest bullshit about “friends don’t let friends call it a festival” is simply more “social engineering” from BMorg, a minority group in Black Rock City who think they’re important and leading the way when in fact they are creating the problem. They are trying to keep the ravers out to clean up the city for their VIP spectators, and pointing fingers everywhere but the right direction. This battle was lost a long time ago. The ravers are part of the DNA of this “event”. Look elsewhere for the causes of your cultural decline.

As one commenter so aptly put it in the epic Burn.Life discussion,  the fish rots from the head down. Arguing semantics about such matters as if it’s a festival (after 30 years) or if hundreds of choreographed fire dancers and a multi-hour pyrotechnic show are live entertainment seems like pointless navel-gazing to me. What’s the deal with all these plug-n-plays and on-Playa vendors? What’s the vision for Fly Ranch? These are much more pressing issues that the Burner community would like to see addressed. Who cares if people want to Instagram their burn, so long as they pick up MOOP and be kind to one another. It’s 2017, most of the people at the festival never knew a time without Internet and cellphones. Let them call it anything they want, as long as they participate.