EDM: Electronic Drugs Music
Drugs! This word carries an immediate and harsh negative connotation for a substantial portion of modern society. Fentanyl addicts, bodies folded in half yet still standing. Toothless meth-heads lisping for spare change. The Wolf of Wall Street crashing his Lamborghini on quaaludes. For others, namely, many of those in the electronic dance music (EDM) community, drugs are a cultural norm, an unparalleled connection to others, and the key to experiencing music to the highest degree. Drugs are found at every rave, every festival, every show, every club. They’re practically synonymous with EDM, and that connection goes both ways. The track that shot Mau P into the atmosphere of DJ stardom is titled “Drugs From Amsterdam.” The primary lyrics in John Summit’s tech-house chart-topper, “In Chicago,” are “I’m drunk. And I’m high. And I’m in Chicago.” The love between drugs and EDM and EDM and drugs is a synergistic cycle that has embedded itself deep into the genre’s culture. There’s just one caveat: Most rave drugs are illegal. And they really shouldn’t be. Here’s why.
To understand why more drugs should be legal, we must first understand why most currently aren’t. According to the Guardian, it boils down to the fact that the popularity of certain drugs with certain groups of people allows the government and mainstream media to criminalize and villainize groups they disagree with. Mexican immigrants and marijuana in the early 1900s. Black Americans and heroin in the ’50s. Hippies (opposing the Vietnam War) and psychedelics in the ’60s. Black Americans (again!) and crack cocaine in the ’70s. Young ravers and MDMA in the 2000’s. Just to name a few (Guardian). This isn’t the obvious answer, but it rings far truer than “drugs are illegal because they’re bad for you,” because otherwise, alcohol and cigarettes (and probably McDonald’s) would be illegal too. Drug illegality isn’t the government looking after your best interests, nor is it God’s secret eleventh commandment. It’s the product of decades of tactical discrimination (and oftentimes racism) to further political and xenophobic agendas.
Let’s consider a cultural fan-favorite: alcohol. It’s not hard to send yourself to the hospital by drinking alcohol (trust me, I’ve done it). In fact, it’s not hard to die drinking alcohol, which has an LD50 of around 13 shots. (CompoundChem). That means the median human will die after taking 13 shots. Every time you pick up a bottle of Kirkland Vodka from Costco, you’re holding enough juice to kill three whole (fairly normal) people. (No citation, just math). Despite this, Americans have decided that alcohol is okay to keep around. Why? Because it’s ingrained in our culture. We drink it at Thanksgiving dinner, at football games, at weddings. It’s considered normal.
Now let’s consider a “hard drug” like MDMA, which has an LD50 of 81.6 mg/lb (Aatbio) and an average dose of 80mg (Crew). For the median person to overdose on ecstasy, they’d have to take an average dose for every single pound in their body. A 150lb person (me) would have to take around 150 doses to overdose. I would have to try exponentially harder to overdose on MDMA than to drink myself to death. Don’t even get me started on how LSD, psilocybin, and marijuana have LD50s that are so high they’re virtually impossible to overdose on (CEUfast). Rave drugs in the EDM scene are like alcohol everywhere else- normal. Cultural. Safe in moderation. The reason they’re perceived as “hard drugs” by the rest of society is derived from the taboo and skewed narratives built to support their illegality- a “hate campaign against young people behaving differently” that hid its “prejudice under a smokescreen of false health concerns” (Guardian).
That being said, drugs, legal or illegal, can still be dangerous. But they’re more dangerous when they’re illegal. Just over a year ago, two kids aged seventeen and twenty died at an EDM festival in Maryland, and another twenty people were sent to the hospital, all for drug-related issues. The twenty-year-old “suffered a ‘toxic reaction to a drink that was handed to him by another concertgoer’” (ProjectKnow), which was reportedly spiked with MDMA, but could have contained a plethora of other substances. “Counterfeit drugs are the biggest risk of MDMA” (NYT). It’s undeniably possible that the kid didn’t even know the drink was spiked. He could have just been thirsty, saw someone with a water bottle (people will often spike their ordinary plastic water bottles to disguise the fact that there’s MDMA in it, which is only necessary because MDMA is illegal), and asked if he could have some. And even if he did know it was spiked, he would likely have had no idea how much to drink to get a safe and satisfactory high, whether it was pure or laced or counterfeit, how he would react to it, how sensitive he would be to it, or how it would mix with whatever might have been in his system already. He made a simple mistake, quite possibly unknowingly, and unfortunately paid for it with his life. The illegality of MDMA didn’t prevent his death- rather, it may have been a primary proponent. Had MDMA been legal, these complications would likely not have been present in his situation, and this boy may have lived.
It’s easy to dismiss a drug-related death as someone who broke the law and got what they paid for. That mentality is simultaneously dehumanizing and absurd, especially in the context of an EDM event. It’s like telling someone who got into a car accident that they should have walked to work that day. We understand that cars can be dangerous, but everyone still drives them. And because of this, we educate people on how to drive safely and ensure they can do so before becoming licensed drivers. And pumping gas? We let children dispense some of the most flammable liquid on the planet into giant rolling tanks that then ignite the flammable liquid- just to get from point A to point B faster. Imagine if we left someone alone who knew absolutely nothing about cars or gasoline or how to put the latter into the former, and assigned them some vague mission like “get gas”. I still fuck up getting gas sometimes. (I forget you have to pay before you pump). In the EDM scene, drugs are like cars- they’re everywhere, and they’re dangerous in naive hands. One should know how to safely operate a car before attempting to drive. The same goes for rave drugs.
In short, education is the key to utilizing something dangerous for our benefit. Abolishing ignorance is the best way to promote safety. The problem is, it’s unnecessarily difficult to educate people on how to do something that’s illegal. It makes it harder to find credible resources online, harder to find people who are willing to talk about it, and harder to establish safe spaces to experiment and determine one’s limits and preferences. Even worse, the illegality of rave drugs promotes behaviors like “dirty rolling”, which is a dangerously popular practice where one mixes Adderall (easily accessible and legal) and alcohol (easily accessible and legal) to experience something similar to being on MDMA (not easily accessible and illegal). It’s not uncommon for dirty rolling to lead directly to cardiac arrest (Alcohol Rehab Guide). Would twenty people have been hospitalized at that Maryland festival if they knew how much to take? How to do it safely? If they could take MDMA instead of mixing drugs that have no business being mixed? Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, and instantly saw a massive drop in drug-related death rates. Even today, Portugal’s drug-related death rate sits at around a quarter of the EU’s average (Transform). Imagine this, but for rave drugs, which are some of the safest among currently illegal drugs (NYT). The hospital visits would be avoided. The deaths would be prevented.
Now imagine a world in which common rave drugs like MDMA (molly, ecstasy), LSD (acid), psilocybin (shrooms), and ketamine (I think people just call this ketamine) are all recreationally legal, and have been for a while. There are established and reputable places to buy these drugs, like dispensaries, and we can guarantee it’s all professionally produced by companies we trust, measured out accurately, and not counterfeit or laced. There’s plenty of readily available information on the health risks, dosages, and administrative techniques. In our fantasy world, EDM events don’t restrict drugs- in fact, as is the nature of capitalism, they probably sell them like beer at a football game. There are no mystery molly bottles, far fewer post-rave hospitalizations, and more events with no deaths. Everyone knows how to get gas. Everyone knows how to drive. (And not everyone has to! I am not arguing that everyone should do drugs.) Those kids wouldn’t have died in this hypothetical world. Lives will be saved following legalization. The show can go on. Safely.
Works Cited
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“Four Loko Continues to Wreak Havoc among Young Drinkers.” College of Public Health, publichealth.gmu.edu/news/2019–10/four-loko-continues-wreak-havoc-among-young-drinkers#:~:text=Supersized%20alcopops — such%20as%20Four,drinks%20in%20one%2023.5%20oz. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.
“Home.” AAT Bioquest, www.aatbio.com/resources/toxicity-lethality-median-dose-td50-ld50/methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.
“MDMA (Ecstasy).” Crew 2000, www.crew.scot/drug/mdma/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.
“Two More Overdose Deaths Reported at EDM Festival.” Project Know, 12 Dec. 2022, projectknow.com/blog/two-overdose-deaths-reported-at-maryland-edm-festival/.
“Why Are Drugs Illegal? You Asked Google — Here’s the Answer | David Nutt.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Oct. 2015, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/28/why-are-drugs-illegal-google-answer.
“Alcohol and Adderall.” Alcohol Rehab Guide, 17 Nov. 2023, www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/drinking-drugs/adderall/#:~:text=Many%20people%20intentionally%20combine%20alcohol,poisoning%20and%20even%20cardiac%20arrest.
“The Lethal Doses of 55 Substances.” CEUfast.Com Blog, ceufast.com/blog/the-lethal-doses-of-55-substances. Accessed 4 Feb. 2024.
“Drug Decriminalisation in Portugal: Setting the Record Straight.” Transform, transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-portugal-setting-the-record-straight. Accessed 4 Feb. 2024.
Nuwer, Rachel. “MDMA Is One of the Safer Illegal Drugs. but There Are Risks.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/well/mind/mdma-ecstasy-risk.html.
