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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Drug legislation like the proposed RAVE Act does more to promote illicit drug use than discourage it.
Jul 16, 2002 | Two years ago I wrote and directed "Groove," a low-budget independent film that depicted one night at an underground San Francisco rave. Within six months of its release by Sony Pictures Classics, a friend who was training at the Seattle Police Department told me that instructors were using my film as a training video, teaching officers what glow-sticks, chill rooms, candy, black lights and DJs symbolized: Drugs, and lots of them.
For the last three years, as raves have begun to register on the national radar -- in part due to an explosive growth of Ecstasy use among youth in America -- the government has been struggling to address what it sees as a growing epidemic. This week, legislators are poised to vote on the most recent and perhaps most comprehensive attempt to date to control the use of Ecstasy: the shrewdly named "RAVE Act" ("Reducing America's Vulnerability to Ecstasy").
A rewrite of the crack-house laws of the 1980s, this bill aims "to prohibit an individual from knowingly opening, maintaining, managing, controlling, renting, leasing, making available for use, or profiting from any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance." In other words, if drugs are found at a warehouse rave, bar, club, loft party or barbecue in someone's backyard, the owner of the venue can get up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $750,000.
This piece of legislation, much like the Seattle police's attempts to use "Groove" as an anti-Ecstasy tool, underscores the naive simplification at the heart of the government's war on this drug. What the lawmakers don't realize -- or, perhaps, are consciously ignoring -- is that this bill isn't going to eliminate the use of Ecstasy, because it's based on vilifying people's desire to use Ecstasy. And because it states the problem in such strong and moralistic terms, the measure is likely to further alienate a population of ravers already disenchanted with the establishment.
The RAVE Act, sponsored by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been making its way through the Senate since mid June. Essentially, it's an amendment to a law from the 1980s that was designed to shut down crack houses by targeting those who ran establishments where drugs were "manufactured or distributed."
Last summer, local police in Miami and New Orleans were trying to use that statute to shut down raves and arrest party promoters, but were successfully challenged by the ACLU. This new version of the bill, however, has been rewritten with broader language that will enable lawmakers to target just about anyone who throws a party where drugs could be present. (As a helpful guide for authorities trying to determine the presence of drugs, the bill again mentions those reliable indicators: glow sticks, chill rooms and pacifiers).
The RAVE Act is a convenient quick fix, the kind of law that legislators love because it easily addresses the concerns of constituents back home. But history has shown us that sound-bite-rich laws don't address the reasons why people do drugs in the first place -- and unless you address these, you'll never solve the problem. For example, the parallels between the law being proposed and those of Prohibition-era America are obvious: In the 1930s, Prohibition attempted to curb the use of alcohol by controlling its production, shutting down the venues that provided it and imposing aggressive penalties on those caught selling it. Yet while all of this activity made for a dramatic show of police force, it mainly succeeded in creating a new class of criminals: When alcohol was outlawed, only outlaws drank (and produced and distributed) alcohol.
Laws like these don't work because there is a fundamental flaw in the government agencies' understanding of drug use. Like Prohibition, as well as the crack-house laws, the RAVE Act assumes that the venues and distribution points of Ecstasy are the key to the problem. As Sen. Grassley said of the RAVE Act, "This legislation will help America's law enforcement go after the latest methods drug dealers are using to push drugs on our kids." According to this logic, if you get rid of the raves and the dealers, the desire to do drugs disappears.
