RAVE ON:
Senator Joseph Biden has proposed a law to make "raves" -- all-night dance events featuring a special varieties of high-tempo music and MDMA ("ecstasy") -- illegal. Here's his press release. This is a follow-up to an effort by the Justice Department to use the "crack house" law, which makes it a crime to set up a drug use location, to shut down rave venues. Naturally, the proposal has drawn howls of outrage, from, for example, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit), among others.
There's lots not to like about this bill, starting with the short title: "This Act may be cited as the `Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002' or the `RAVE Act'." But it's far from obvious that shutting down raves would be a bad idea.
MDMA use has been soaring, as measured both by surveys and by emergency-room visits. My reading of the current evidence does not suggest that the drug's effects are nearly as bad as the drug warriors would like us to believe, (see this news story about a journal article arguing that the dangers have been hyped; but see also the commentary attached to the article, arguing for the opposite conclusion, and the studies referenced there) and last year's Congressionally-ordered toughening of the sentencing guidelines in MDMA distribution cases seemed way out of proportion to the known risks.
But it's also the case that the pattern of MDMA consumption has changed significantly for the worse over the last decade, with a substantial incidence of the sort of high-dose, frequent use that no one thinks is safe. That pattern of use is associated with raves; the drug's powers as a pure stimulant, which remain even after repeated use has dulled its more subtle effects, are greatly valued by people who want to stay up all night dancing, three nights every weekend.
One line of thinking about raves is that they are good places to spread information about safer drug use. But if they are also places where social setting encourages less safe drug use, it might well be the case that shutting them down would, on balance, reduce the aggregate damage done by the drug.
In some ways, this is a reprise of the argument about the gay bathhouses early in the AIDS epidemic. (See Randy Shilts's account in And the Band Played On.) I think it's now reasonably clear that shutting them down would have saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives. Now analogy is not identity, and it's quite possible that, even if raves are A Bad Thing, trying to shut them down by legislation will prove futile or counterproductive. But, as always, I'm troubled by the extent to which the reflexive authoritarianism of the drug warriors is matched by reflexive libertarianism on the other side, with no one very interested in the likely actual results of the policies being debated.
MDMA policy is a hard, high-stakes question: too hard, and too important, to be dealt with by the usual round of sloganeering by the warriors and their opponents.
Senator Joseph Biden has proposed a law to make "raves" -- all-night dance events featuring a special varieties of high-tempo music and MDMA ("ecstasy") -- illegal. Here's his press release. This is a follow-up to an effort by the Justice Department to use the "crack house" law, which makes it a crime to set up a drug use location, to shut down rave venues. Naturally, the proposal has drawn howls of outrage, from, for example, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit), among others.
There's lots not to like about this bill, starting with the short title: "This Act may be cited as the `Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002' or the `RAVE Act'." But it's far from obvious that shutting down raves would be a bad idea.
MDMA use has been soaring, as measured both by surveys and by emergency-room visits. My reading of the current evidence does not suggest that the drug's effects are nearly as bad as the drug warriors would like us to believe, (see this news story about a journal article arguing that the dangers have been hyped; but see also the commentary attached to the article, arguing for the opposite conclusion, and the studies referenced there) and last year's Congressionally-ordered toughening of the sentencing guidelines in MDMA distribution cases seemed way out of proportion to the known risks.
But it's also the case that the pattern of MDMA consumption has changed significantly for the worse over the last decade, with a substantial incidence of the sort of high-dose, frequent use that no one thinks is safe. That pattern of use is associated with raves; the drug's powers as a pure stimulant, which remain even after repeated use has dulled its more subtle effects, are greatly valued by people who want to stay up all night dancing, three nights every weekend.
One line of thinking about raves is that they are good places to spread information about safer drug use. But if they are also places where social setting encourages less safe drug use, it might well be the case that shutting them down would, on balance, reduce the aggregate damage done by the drug.
In some ways, this is a reprise of the argument about the gay bathhouses early in the AIDS epidemic. (See Randy Shilts's account in And the Band Played On.) I think it's now reasonably clear that shutting them down would have saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives. Now analogy is not identity, and it's quite possible that, even if raves are A Bad Thing, trying to shut them down by legislation will prove futile or counterproductive. But, as always, I'm troubled by the extent to which the reflexive authoritarianism of the drug warriors is matched by reflexive libertarianism on the other side, with no one very interested in the likely actual results of the policies being debated.
MDMA policy is a hard, high-stakes question: too hard, and too important, to be dealt with by the usual round of sloganeering by the warriors and their opponents.
posted by Mark Kleiman at
8:44 PM
