perfidy

Mark Kleiman weighs in on last week's incident in which Colorado law enforcement used the threat of RAVE Act prosecution to stop a pot-legalization concert. His is an interesting opinion, and one rarely heard in the blog-o-sphere.

Maybe Glenn [Reynolds] is right: perhaps the new law was a bad idea. Certainly, it gives lots of discretionary power to a Justice Department whose current leadership has consistently abused the powers entrusted to it, as when it tried to use the DEA’s power to revoke the licenses that physicians need to prescribe controlled substances to nullify Oregon’s assisted-suicide law. If the DEA really did what it has been accused of doing in this case – which seems plausible, though at the moment the only available accounts are from sources hostile to the DEA – that can’t really be called surprising.

But the target of the law – the growing use of MDMA (“ecstasy”) – is a genuine, and potentially large, problem, and the law has, in my view, a better chance of doing something about that problem than most drug-policy initiatives have of reaching their targets. Here’s why I think so:

Starting in the mid-1990s, MDMA emerged rather suddenly from the alphabet soup of recreational chemicals to become what is now probably the second-most-widely used purely illicit drug, behind cannabis. . . .The current MDMA initiation rate is higher than the cocaine initiation rate ever was: cocaine peaked at about 1.5 million new users per year.

Even more troubling, what used to be a distinctively “European” MDMA use pattern – multiple doses, every night, every weekend – has become much more common here, and that more dangerous pattern is closely associated with “raves”: all-night dance parties with a mostly youthful clientele and a set of musical styles conducive to trance-dancing.

MDMA is a highly reinforcing drug; it induces in many users a strongly positive emotional state that lasts for several hours. But it has one very peculiar characteristic: its capacity to produce that state typically wears off with repeated use. Virtually any drug will create a tolerance: that is, over time higher doses will be needed to generate the same biological effects. But the diminished effects of MDMA cannot be recovered by using more of the drug: that’s the peculiar characteristic. . . .

That being so, neither the fact that the RAVE Act will tend to discourage some socially responsible actions by rave operators (such as providing “chill-out” rooms, encouraging the distribution of information about the risks of MDMA use and how to limit them, and allowing on-site pill-testing) nor the risk that the law will be abused, as it seems to have been in the Montana case, suffices to convince me that it will do more harm than good.

I can imagine a radically different approach to MDMA policy, based on harm reduction via dose and frequency limitation, that might have better overall results, but I can’t imagine getting such a policy adopted in the current political climate. If the practical alternative to the RAVE Act was drug policy as usual -- a little more law enforcement, longer sentences for dealers, and inventing fancier lies to tell the children -- at least the RAVE Act stands out from its background as having some chance of not being a complete waste of effort. . . .

The bare assertion by Glenn’s friends at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism that “The RAVE Act has no valid law enforcement purpose” fails to convince.

While agree with Kleiman that MDMA is a big problem, and a dangerous drug, I can't get behind his analysis of the situation. Drugs are ALREADY illegal. More laws aren't going to make them more so. (How much more black can you go? None. None more black.) Worse, Kleiman underestimates the collateral effects of the law, and probably isn't aware of others.

I have attended, well, if not exactly raves, then parties that would be raves if more people were present. I had a wonderful time, and did not take Ecstasy. Part of my enjoyment hinged on the existence of the "chill-out" room. I could go sit in blue-lit quietness, relax, and most importantly DRINK WATER. My point? That classifying the presence of chill-out rooms as a priori evidence of drug use is illogical, and discouraging party planners from setting up such a room is a health risk to all present. They exist for all dancers to get away from the heat and rehydrate, not just the damn drug users. Furthermore, organizations like Dance Safe, who offer drug-testing to partygoers to ensure the purity of the doses, have done a WHOLE lot of good. Keeping them from doing their job will just make matters worse as party-drug use goes further and further underground, and adulterated drugs go undetected. Think bathtub gin-- it's bad news.

Moreover, no objection to the RAVE Act has touched on what I find most regrettable. Let me tell you a story. I have a good friend, let's call him Zippy, who has been promoting concerts in his hometown since he was fourteen. Mostly, these concerts have been scuzzy local teenagers playing music for other scuzzy local teenagers. In the process, Zippy has learned a lot of skills: marketing, negotiation, basic contracts, event planning, how to obtain licenses and security through legitimate channels, crisis management, and a bucketload of chutzpah. Even more, Zippy was instrumental in creating a "scene" in his hometown-- a network of people and events that focussed the energy of that class of teenager who would otherwise be off sniffing glue, vandalizing, and getting into adult-size trouble. Many of the kids at these shows came away with ideas of their own. The experience has taught Zippy a lot, contributed money to the local economy, improved the quality of life in his community, and actually helped the children (think of the children!).

But forget all that. Zippy has gotten out of the local-concert business forever. Why? Because, over the years there have been some incidents. Crackpipes in a crowd. Pot being sold on the premises. Underage drinking. And although Zippy always took steps to eliminate this behavior, hiring off-duty policement as security to patrol the crowd, and letting it be known that no such behavior would be tolerated, things happen. After years of rising police pressure, the RAVE Act has been the final straw. Now that Zippy knows that he could serve a long felony drug rap just because some dumbass kid brought meth to one of his shows, he's done. Never mind his work keeping the kids off drugs. Never mind his conscientious approach to security. He fears that one slip-up could land him in Mandatory Minimum-land. In his assessment, the risk is now too great, so he's done.

This is the kind of undetectable collateral damage the RAVE act can and will do, and why I am foursquare against it. If Zippy-- who has contributed a great deal to his community-- quits for fear of prison, then something is wrong, I think. The RAVE Act is dangerous, wrongheaded, overreaching, and stupid.

A bit like using a neutron bomb to take care of a rat problem in your basement.