Tag Archives: dancesafe

Mar 31 2016

Ten Questions With Terry Gotham: Stefanie Jones of The Drug Policy Alliance

(This week, it is my privilege to bring you a conversation with one of the hardest working women at the intersection between nightlife & safety, and a dear friend, Stefanie Jones, Director of Audience Development  at the Drug Policy Alliance. Her #SaferPartying initiative & MusicFan programs are crucial to for harm reduction, drug policy activism and global dance population at large. Interview by Terry Gotham)

Stefanie Jones_Music Industry session_Nov 2015

1. How was Burning Man 2015? Did you go to any other transformational festivals that actually didn’t suck when it came to harm reduction & forward thinking drug policy?
Burning Man 2015 was a definite revelation. As I like to tell people, I’ve been invited to it by various friends and people I know practically every year since 2002 but for a lot of reasons never went. It was nice because all that time let me develop a theory around what it would be like for me to go and what the best approach was, and without feeling totally wrong about what I thought, during the preparation process and the actual experience of course it’s all out the window. Even if you know, it’s not the same as when you actually do a thing, right?

Burning Man is making some strides when it comes to integrating harm reduction. In 2015 they went further than they ever had before by giving the Zendo Project two locations on the playa – two safe spaces for people who are feeling overwhelmed for whatever reason, to stop by or be brought to and be cared for by trained volunteers and therapists. Burning Man Org also listed Zendo ahead of time in the JackRabbit Speaks newsletter and in their entry materials. I volunteered with Zendo and it was incredibly rewarding, as it always is. It’s a start but there’s certainly more they could do. They have a huge challenge because the event is on federal land and there are MANY enforcement and health agencies in the mix the organizers have to keep happy. A lot of people are surprised Burning Man isn’t leading when it comes to drug policy and harm reduction, but quite honestly, given the nature and location of the event, it would be hard for them to lead.

The gold standard is actually the Boom Festival in Portugal. They have an unfair advantage maybe, because all drugs are decriminalized in that country and it really clears the way for comprehensive harm reduction to take place. Nonetheless they do it all: onsite drug education and drug checking (testing drugs for adulterants), as well as a Zendo-equivalent compassionate care service called Kosmicare. All harm reduction groups are fully supported by and integrated into the event.

In the US the clear leader is Lightning in a Bottle. We have a little harm reduction coalition working with them, and the work is summarized here.

Also, it’s not a transformational festival, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Backwoods Festival in Oklahoma. Last year they invited DanceSafe onsite and not only let them do drug checking, but integrated an early alert system if dangerous or misrepresented substances were found. In Oklahoma!! Giant respect for this scrappy event.

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Oct 23 2015

LSD, Burning Man, Safety & Susan Sarandon

By Terry Gotham

While there are literally thousands of sober people at Burning Man every year, and how to guides & resources for individuals who choose to not drink or do drugs at Burning Man, we can’t seem to shake the monkey on our back. The class of drugs that seem to be tethered most tightly to Burning Man (besides Margaritas & poorly rolled joints) is psychedelics, acid in particular. For better or worse, it’s as if LSD & Burning Man have become linked. There is something deeply primal about taking certain kinds of drugs and dancing to a beat in the middle of nowhere until dawn. The trope of “taking acid at Burning Man” has been so deeply embedded into the American alternative cultural landscape that there’s an extensively upvoted list of answers for the “What should you think about before trying LSD for the first time and doing so at Burning Man?” question on Quora.

Not just because of the psytrancers or the hippies either. With more and more of the tech landscape believing psychedelics can generate “out of the box thinking” or a predeliction for black turtle necks, the merging between the technorati, the 1% & Black Rock City will most likely remain psychedelic. There are dozens of trip reports from the playa and with reporters being granted expanded access to Burning Man, the potential for your private LSD-drenched art walk to make it into The Atlantic or Salon grows every year. But, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t having resonant, powerful experiences on playa consuming this stuff, or even merely orbiting those that do. Continue reading →

Aug 28 2015

2C-I & 2C-B: Research Chemicals Before It Was Cool

2CB

The 2C family of drugs is one of Shulgin’s famous progeny. He synthesized over 250 psychoactive chemicals, nearly all of them never having been consumed by humans before. As DanceSafe reminds us, there are 30+ unique chemicals in the 2C family of drugs, including 2C-I, 2C-E, 2C-D, 2C-T7 and 2C-B. So yes, that crazy dude at Entheogen Village years ago wasn’t kidding. That really was a drug name he was talking about & he wasn’t just tripping really hard.

They’re in the class of psychedelics known as phenethylamines, and came to prominence in the late 90’s & early 2000’s until the most populat of them, 2C-B, was scheduled internationally in 2001. Before that, you could still buy it on the internet. And yes, plenty of burners, ravers, psychonauts, taggers & straight-up gangsters purchased a whole bunch online while the getting was good. Sound familiar to anyone? It should, considering Erowid removed the “Research Chemical” label from 2C-B last year. We actually had a drug graduate from “new wackiness” to “yup, the kids are doing that now.”

That’s right, 2C-B & 2C-I served as some of the first examples of “research chemicals” entering the mainstream, especially as MDMA & LSD hit spotted rough patches in availability in the late 90’s & mid-2000’s across the country. Some users came to prefer the 2C’s to LSD or magic mushrooms because of the intense visuals higher doses of the drug provides. While lower doses give people a feeling of connection, at higher doses, many report intense visual illusions & effects. Trails, geometric patterns, carpets breathing & rainbow emanating from what seems to be nowhere, all reported by random users on & off playa of course. These symptoms come without the commensurate crush of thought & “back of the head” work that most report with traditional psychedelics.

This lightness can be a double edged sword. While many enjoy it and use it as a party drug, the lack of mental symptoms can sometimes convince people they’ve not taken enough. Leading many of my friends to the inscrutable “Oh shit the walls are melting” moments after they re-up their dosage. I can say (with confidence) I have seen more people fuck up their dosages & re-dose on the 2C family of chemicals than any other kind of drug. Whether at a burner party, a bar, club, on the deep playa, or at some stupid EDM brand orgy we call a festival now, I’ve seen the intensity knock even the most seasoned psychedelic user on their glowing ass.

It’s a potent reminder of the power of designer drugs. While it doesn’t seem as powerful as LSD or as binding/psychedelic as ayahuasca or psilocybin, set & setting need to be taken into account before doing fistfuls of psychedelics. Additionally, when the difference between the “low” & “high” dose is 5-10mg, dudes at festivals claiming they can eyeball the dose need to be shut down with extreme prejudice.

I do mean this. All of you playa-bound peoples, if you’re not rolling up with a milligram scale, take a pass on this one if some guy says he can dose you out on an index card inside of a tent. Unless you’re a fan of nausea, trembling, chills, anxiety or death, as someone in the UK in 2012 discovered.

2C-I also has a curious side effect that has only been in anecdotal reports around the internet, so hasn’t made it into the clinical documentation. That being one of the longest come-up times of any designer drug I’ve ever seen. When you see someone dose at 11:30 & it not hit them until 2am, you know you’re dealing with something a little out of the ordinary. This is even more of a reason to give yourself time, sometimes 4+ hours, before “doing more” or taking something else. Even in Black Rock City.

Have fun you crazy kids! But be safe, piss clear & don’t re-dose! The playa commands it!