With all due respect, I think you miss the real significance of raves in your paper posted at academia.edu. Prior to the English government's unscientific demonization of ecstasy following the death of raver Leah Betts in the 1990s, the rave scene was the most peaceful and unifying activity in English history. This is the startling and wonderful thing about the rave scene, not the fact that it represents a variety of what we call leisure. (The incredibly rare death in question was caused by the Drug War itself, which criminalized mere research into criminalized substances, thereby rendering it impossible to create "safe use" guidelines for Ecstasy, and making it impossible to warn dancers like Leah about the need to keep properly hydrated while on the dance floor.)
Here are some direct quotes from DJ's about that incredibly peaceful rave scene -- a peace that authorities not only took for granted but actually tried to discourage with their Criminal Justice Bill of 1994:
• "It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
• "It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
• "Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
The problem of the rave scene was not Ecstasy. The problem was a Drug Warrior ethos that holds criminalized substances to standards far beyond the safety expectations of any other substances. Aspirin kills thousands a year and yet there is no cry to criminalize it. Alcohol racks up a daily death toll in Britain and yet there are no billboards attempting to hold alcohol responsible for individual deaths. Yet Drug War mythology says that a criminalized substance can be pilloried and completely dismissed the moment that it has even been RELATED, however indirectly, to one single solitary death. This is Drug Warrior propaganda, however, not science.
The best way for authorities to deal with the rave scene is to stop persecuting it and let it thrive as the incredibly peaceful phenomenon that it is -- or rather it WAS before Drug Warriors held Ecstasy to a hypocritical safety standard that no substance in the world could ever live up to, meanwhile doing everything they could to ban research that could have produced safety guidelines for the drug in question.
So, what has government policy actually accomplished so far with respect to the rave scene? It took the most peaceful crowd phenomenon in British history and turned it into a shooting gallery, turning dancers away from Ecstasy and turning them toward anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol instead.
The best thing that government can do about the rave scene, therefore, is to back off and allow peace, love and understanding to actually exist -- rather than demonizing substances that bring such peace about, in deference to America's unprecedented, ahistorical and anti-scientific war on substances of which racist politicians disapprove.
To approach the rave scene from the point of view of leisure is interesting, perhaps, but in my opinion it turns us away from the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the Drug War demonizes substances rather than teaching us how to use them wisely and safely, and the fact that the Drug Warrior judges people, not by the content of their character but by the contents of their digestive system.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University: in response to his paper at Academia.edu entitled 'Regulating the Rave Scene', published on April 25, 2021 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
n response to 'Regulating the Rave Scene' by Troy Glover.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because you still need to read the essay about how the empathogenic drug Ecstasy brought peace, love and understanding to the British rave scene in the 1990s:
You have been reading an article entitled, Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University: in response to his paper at Academia.edu entitled 'Regulating the Rave Scene', published on April 25, 2021 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
