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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Within months of the New Orleans indictment, prosecutors in Panama City Beach, Fla., indicted promoters of a popular club called Club La Vela, home to MTV's spring break bootyfests and the nation's largest nightclub, under crack-house laws as well. In Florida, the war against raves is already several years old: In 1997, state officials passed a bill that made it illegal for clubs or restaurants that sold liquor to stay open past 2 a.m. Two years later, the state police instituted "Operation Heat Rave," raiding 57 clubs with the intent of shutting them down if they found any evidence of drug use. Club La Vela, the most visible club in Florida, became the unfortunate locus of the authorities' ire; at one news conference, Panama City Beach Police Chief J.B. Holloway went so far as to accuse the club's owners of "raising [underage patrons] to come back and buy their drugs later."
Club La Vela was raided in early 2000, and police turned up a variety of drugs -- although they found no evidence that the owners themselves were selling illegal substances. On May 5, 2001, Club La Vela owners Patrick and Thorston Pfeffer were slapped with an indictment for allowing drug trafficking at their club. Like the New Orleans case, a federal grand jury indicted the nightclub owners under the crack-house statute; unlike the New Orleans case, the government also seized the assets of Club La Vela and forbade the owners from leaving the state. (Club La Vela's owners, in turn, are suing the local law enforcement agencies for defamation and depriving them of their right to public assembly.) The case is set to go to trial in July.
Meanwhile, the crack-house gambit gains momentum in prosecutors' offices across the country. In Chicago, where several clubs have already been shut down after hosting raves, Mayor Richard Daley sought a local twist on the approach that would mandate six months in jail for anyone who allowed drug sales on his or her property. As Daley said at a press conference in March, "The people who run rave parties -- or own the rooms where they take place -- know exactly what's going on. But the city does not have sufficient powers to hold them responsible." The ordinance passed in early May.
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There is a strategic logic to the government's war on glowsticks and pacifiers. For several years, federal drug authorities have been conducting a P.R. campaign that labels these toys as "drug paraphernalia" that will help identify that drugs are being taken. "What they've done is establish the beginning of a legal paper trail to substantiate their claims" and make it easier for authorities to target nightclubs, says Patterson of the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund. "Within a month of the indictment in New Orleans, a lot of major nightclubs had already stopped selling glowsticks."
But while a few candy ravers might be upset at losing their glowsticks, there's a deadlier side to the new crackdown. A much more dangerous loss to club kids is the "chill room," which the New Orleans case also identified as an accouterment of drug use in its list of paraphernalia banned from Barbecue Inc.'s parties. A number of other seemingly innocuous club practices -- like having ambulances present, featuring booths of harm-reduction groups like DanceSafe on the premises or even pumping in extra air conditioning -- are being targeted by authorities as well.
The dance music community is not blind to the fact that drugs are a problem at raves; as the rave scene has grown, it has given birth to organizations that promote responsible clubbing. The most prominent is DanceSafe, a two-year-old Oakland, Calif., nonprofit founded by theology grad student Emanuel Sferios. Hundreds of DanceSafe volunteers, in 24 chapters around the globe, spend their weekends visiting raves and dispensing information about safe drug consumption. Besides providing practical party tips -- reminding kids to drink water, chill out and avoid overheating -- volunteers also perform on-the-spot tests of ecstasy tablets to ensure that what the ravers are consuming is actually MDMA rather than a potentially lethal concoction like DXM or PMA.
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