A sobering thought.
It’s getting rarer and rarer to find the average clubber and techno-music fan who isn’t faced with drugs. The chances of hearing an honest, surprised, scared “What the fuck?” when offered MDMA, E and the like, are minimal. Innocence has long been lost, and we can now swiftly divide the population of the average dance-floor into those who do, and those who haven’t yet. Not so much peer pressure, but simply embracing the culture itself in all aspects, is rapidly becoming a drive behind club-land drug taking.
The substance will vary from scene to scene. The drum&bass scene which Bristol has such intimate ties with, tends to lean slightly more in the direction of true amphetamines, such as Speed, Cocaine and Crack. Conversely, Hip Hop tends to encourage Cannabis and Barbiturates. Electro complements Ecstacy and MDMA. This is far from stereotyping, but rather an observation of how different types of music encourage different narcotic usage. Yes, there will be a certain drift of product either way, these are in no way, shape or form concrete rules, but this is to find issue with the wrong point. What strikes me as the terrifying facet of a cemented feature of society, is that each of these scenes is tied so intimately to a drug.
There is so much to be said for Drugs. In small, irregular quantities, they can be safe, amazing forms of entertainment. But no one ever enjoys them like this. A friend of mine, someone I’ve become close to in the last 6 months, roughly proportional to an escalating drug habit, treated himself to 16 pills on New Years Eve. 16 pills; that is to say, 8 times more than most clubbers see as appropriate. Of course, when I say most clubbers, I actually end up referring to an increasingly smaller percentage, since usage is growing as fast as these extremes, and upper limits of what the body can persevere through are being reached.
It wouldn’t be quite as tragic if the problem only extended to the occasional fool damaging himself like this every once in a while, but seemingly every clubber is feeling the tug of the whirlpool these days. The Halloween rave I attended could barely be fairly named as such; it was inside a reputable establishment, on the edge of the city centre. This didn’t stop in turning into the chemical equivalent of the Somme. Only better soundtracked. And probably, for a few minutes at least, a hell of a lot happier.
Speaking from that one experience, there’s something fucking disturbing about being in a room with about 100 people, all gleefully proclaiming how they’re shortening their life expectency in (admit it) a damned anti-social way. It’s like experience land or something. You look around, and you see eyes vibrating, giggling, shaking, jumping… and suddenly there’s this incredibly real sensation that you’re watching selves be eroded slowly away, leaving these bowling balls of sheer emotion, changing depending on what they hit.
What can you do? You can’t tell people like this to stop, and why should you? It’s not an intrinsically evil act itself, it’s just this particular perversion thereof which leaves me feeling slightly ill as I watch. Irregularity solves everything. It would stop a tolerance building up as quickly as it does, it would slow the physical damage. It would make those nights where you indulge something really different from anything else, as well as showing the joys of just drinking and dancing that people can forget.
Just a thought, that’s all. Makes you think, I suppose.
Recently, in relation to a possible reform of Irish Drug Policy, BBC reporter Diarmaid Fleming referenced the extent to which cocaine abuse has infiltrated all social classes. There were fears back when
