ON THE DANCE FLOOR
By midnight the dance floor of Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion was a sea of singlets and bras and bare chests. The music calmed down and so did the dancers, bobbing gently to the beat; then the tempo quickened and vibrations rattled the plastic seats on the edge of the dance floor and everyone went a little bit crazy.
It was the night of the dance party to celebrate Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The crowd included the expected mix of gays, lesbians, fag hags and random trashbags. If there was something which was unexpected about the crowd, at least to my eyes, it was the mix of ages. There may have been a few teens, but this was not a young person’s event.
The average age of the dancers cloaked in the dry-ice fog and laser light seemed to be thirties, late twenties at the very least. It was a reminder of how the youth of the eighties and nineties have brought dance parties, and the drugs which go with them, on the journey towards middle age. Research shows that the number of people taking ecstasy into their thirties and forties is increasing. Back in 1998 just one in 50 (1.9 per cent) Australian men in their thirties had taken ecstasy in the past year compared to one in sixteen in 2007 (6.3 per cent), according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. For women the proportion rose from 1.7 to 3.2 per cent during the same period.1
I was at the dance party to observe an initiative designed to keep people as safe as possible in this environment, particularly if they have taken drugs. Organised by ACON, a community-based health organisation previously known as the AIDS Council of New South Wales, ‘rovers’ wear hot-pink vests and move in pairs. The armoury they carry consists of flashlights, walkie-talkies and light-up batons for directing help to medical emergencies.
I tagged along with two rovers who were veterans of many parties. We walked into the ladies toilet, where girls in sunglasses and fairy wings were doing god knows what; it seemed to be always the same girls there every time we came round. One of the rovers swooped down to look under the toilet doors. They weren’t looking for cubicles with more than one person standing in them, though there were a couple of those. Instead, they were looking for cubicles where there was no one standing, where people were slumped unconscious or sick. At this stage of the evening, there were none of those.
For all the obvious drug taking going on, it was hard to find anyone in trouble. Guys came up asking for directions to the VIP tent. On the edge of the dance floor the rovers asked a girl to put her shoes back on for safety.
By 1.30 a.m. the crowd had thickened on the dance floor and on the edges of the hall; in the stands, people were lined up along the railings, dancing and swigging from water bottles and premixed vodka cans. Three policewomen picked their way past the dancers. On one of the seats was a young guy in a patterned singlet, nodding off. One of the rovers chatted with him, checking he was just suffering from tiredness.
Further along, a girl in a bikini top was slumped against a guy in a cap, who seemed to be her boyfriend. Her head was resting at an unnatural angle, her stilettos were splayed over the back of the seat in front of her. He tapped his feet to the music, trying to cajole her into full consciousness. One of the rovers knelt down to talk to them; the guy leaned in to hear what the rover was saying above the blast of dance music. It seemed the boyfriend didn’t want the nuisance of a trip to the medical tent. And he got lucky because, after a friendly joggle, the girl was awake and smiling.
An hour later, we passed them again and the boyfriend was jubilant. ‘She’s alive!’ he says. ‘Hey, thank you.’ He pounded his chest above his heart and gave a thumbs-up signal.
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Australia has a proud history of harm minimisation when it comes to drugs, sex and disease. In the early days of the AIDS crisis, our proactive approach to matters such as needle exchanges and condom distribution helped us stem the epidemic here even while it was spreading rampantly in places such as the United States. In the years since, harm minimisation measures have been extended further—into the realm of drugs. The establishment of New South Wales drug courts, first piloted in 1999, has offered more effective ways of changing the behaviour of addicts than sending them to jail. In 2001, a medically supervised injecting room was established in the red-light district of Sydney.
Active policing is not necessarily out of step with the principle of reducing harm. When a particularly dangerous batch of drugs comes onto the market, such as PMA masquerading as ecstasy, the police are very active at spreading the message through their media arm so that drug users know to be particularly wary.
Even policing aimed at seizing drugs is not necessarily out of step with the principle of reducing harm. Supply reduction—making it more difficult for people to access a drug, so they take less of it or take it less frequently—can limit the damage that the drug does. This applies to legal drugs as well: there are laws which limit the hours when pubs can open and which bar them from serving alcohol to patrons who are already drunk.
But policing can be done in a way which undermines the aim of minimising harm. And I couldn’t help feeling that this was the case on the night of the Mardi Gras dance party. Outside the party a heavy police presence was attempting to frighten people out of taking drugs into the very place where they were likely to get the most help imaginable if they ran into health problems.
When I’d arrived, a few hours earlier, you couldn’t miss the police. It was just before 10 p.m. and a queue was forming on a cordoned-off section of roadway outside the Hordern Pavilion. Most in the queue were dressed in shorts and singlets, or jeans and T-shirts, with the occasional spangled drag queen, strap of black leather or colonel’s cap. Then came the police with two scent-hungry labradors.
I counted 22 uniformed police as they took up positions between the queue and the entry gates. There were many more around, some undercover; these 22 were just the police who were standing guard. There were plenty more on the other side of the road, where a mobile command post had been set up under fig trees; here there was a variety of vehicles, one looking like an old school bus, repainted in white with the blue logo of the police force. It was here that partygoers were ‘processed’ once they were sniffed out by the dogs.
Black labradors came up behind the queue, sniffing at ankles. Some people turned around in shock, others looked annoyed. Occasionally someone would bend down to pat one of the dogs.
Then a woman in jeans and a black-and-white striped T-shirt reached around to her backpack and took out dark-blue latex gloves. It took me a moment to comprehend what was happening, but then she reached down to the asphalt and used the gloves to pick up a tiny ziplock bag with a pill inside. She was an undercover cop. The dogs had shaken loose some drugs, dropped by queuers before they were sniffed out.
The dogs roved further down the street, going against the current of the crowd moving towards the entrance. Behind the dogs and their handlers, uniformed police wandered slowly and then surged forward whenever there was a positive signal from a dog or an altercation with a partygoer. Four police converged to take away one man in his thirties for processing. Several times someone who had already been processed and found to be carrying nothing was sniffed out again. Exasperated, one partygoer explained the situation to an officer. ‘You’re good to go,’ he was told. Two horses clopped towards the entrance and stood watching.
Further down the street, police had stopped two women and the scene resembled something out of a prison drama. One woman was against the wall, her hands up against the bricks of the Hall of Industries as she was patted down and searched. Her bag was taken from her. She was asked to sit down on some stairs and take off her shoes. She raised her feet towards the police and flexed them, at the same time spreading her toes to show there was nothing between them. Her partner flapped her shirt open for searching as well. Perhaps the police found something, because they were both then marched across the road for processing.
Not long afterwards, another guy in his thirties was led away. In the darkness, broken only by streetlights and the yellow flashing lights of a roads authority truck moving the road blocks, he appeared to gulp as the police took him off. And then the dogs found yet another partygoer who had already been searched—‘You can see the constable there. I’ve just been strip searched,’ the angry target protested.
Perhaps the police operations outside such parties do discourage some people from taking drugs in the first place. But for those who are not dissuaded, this attention seems likely to simply encourage them to take drugs in ways which are less safe—in private places, far from the help of health professionals, or by taking everything at once before facing the gauntlet of the sniffer dogs.
It’s a shame, because inside the dance party there was an air of earnest attention to safety—all sweat and latex gloves, dilated pupils and sensible water bottles for adequate hydration.
The contrast between the scenes inside and outside the party captured one of the dilemmas faced by those who want to be sensible about their drug use: how to strike a balance between minimising the harm potentially caused by the substance while managing the risk of getting caught, and all the personal and legal ramifications that would follow. It is an impossible balance to strike when some of the safest places to take drugs, such as this sort of highly supervised dance party, are also the places with the greatest police presence.
As a contrast, I thought back to the dance party I went to on the beach. There was no first aid on site, and if an ambulance had had to be called, it would have been difficult even to give them an address. And yet, in terms of not getting caught, its isolation, its distance from the media glare, made it the ideal place to take drugs.
There is a key difference between alcohol and illicit drugs when it comes to safety. If you want to drink relatively safely, in a way which minimises harm to yourself and those around you, the authorities will aid you at every step. With drugs the message is more ambivalent. The authorities will allow some measures to help people minimise the harm they do to themselves and others, such as allowing rovers and first aid at dance parties and publicising adulterated batches of pills, but there is a limit. Even worse for the drug taker, uncertainty and danger are actively cultivated as ways to discourage use.
Consider a few examples. On bottles of liquor—whether whisky, wine or vodka—the label warns the drinker precisely how many standard drinks are contained within. It goes without saying that the ingredients match what is stated on the bottle—authorities ensure the contents are not rounded out with methylated spirits or cleaning solvent, even if it would be more profitable for the producer to do so. In bars and clubs, laminated posters remind drinkers how many standard drinks, or how many shots or schooners, they can have before safely driving. Bartenders are legally forbidden from serving more drinks to patrons who are already thoroughly hammered.
Of course, there will always be drunks who ignore warnings; but those who want to drink relatively safely can use the copious and accurate information widely available as a guide. And even those inclined towards reckless abandon have a degree of protection, thanks to the laws regulating the production and advertising of alcohol, and its responsible service.
With illicit drugs it is different. Cocaine users may keep track of how many lines they have snorted off a CD cover or nightclub toilet cistern, but there is no way of knowing how much active ingredient the lines actually contain. The rule of thumb is that there are ten lines to a gram, but the purity of a gram varies wildly. Even if you knew precisely how many milligrams of pure cocaine you had ingested, what would this actually mean? There are no handy posters in toilet cubicles advising what constitutes a safe quantity of cocaine for most people. And how long should you wait after snorting cocaine before driving? Is it one hour? Or 24 hours? Or three days?
Educational campaigns tout the impossibility of knowing what a pill contains as a reason not to use it, and it is a good reason. But uncertainty about the ingredients of a batch of drugs is not an inevitable element of the drug; it is a result of its illegality. This is another aspect of the illegality–logic loop about which Professor Nutt spoke: i.e. it is important to keep drugs dangerous to discourage people from using them, because drugs are dangerous. Perhaps somebody dies after taking a pill she believed was ecstasy, but which was in fact a much more dangerous drug—this is taken as proof that ecstasy is dangerous, because you don’t know what it really contains. Heroin addicts turn to theft and prostitution to fund their addictions; this shows we need to push up the price of drugs so people don’t use them as much, because taking drugs leads to crime.
With the strength of different batches of drugs so variable, and in lieu of reliable official information, users can end up relying on ‘folk pharmacology’ for safety. This was the description used by researchers studying the way gay men living in inner Sydney sought to reduce the harm from their drugs by word-of-mouth information—lay experts, whom the researchers identify as ‘network nannies’, teach less-experienced drug users how to do it safely.2
This characterisation rang true with the illicit drug users interviewed for this book. When asked what steps they had taken to stay as safe as possible, they commonly reported relying on friends for advice. ‘Generally I asked my mate who I bought it from how strong it was, and trusted their advice,’ said a Liberal voter living in country New South Wales who has tried ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.
‘I would never accept hard drugs (anything created in a lab) from a stranger. I know I still can’t know for sure where they’ve come from . . . but at least I know my friend has taken it before . . . and isn’t dead,’ said a 28-year-old woman from Adelaide.
As well as relying on the advice of friends, there were a number of principles and snippets of folklore which illicit drug users gleaned through word of mouth and applied, well, most of the time. One rule of thumb was not mixing drugs, especially not uppers and downers, because they would cancel each other out. A 23-year-old woman studying for a combined degree at the Australian National University quoted a rhyme about the importance of not smoking marijuana after drinking: ‘Grass and beer you’re in the clear; beer and grass you’re on your arse.’
Another principle was to start off with small doses. ‘If you’re unsure of the strength, start small. You can always take more—but once it’s in, it’s tough to get out,’ said a father-of-one from Sydney.
Even though so many of the drug users interviewed relied on trust and word of mouth, they were aware of the limitations of doing this. ‘There was always folklore about what colour of pills to avoid—but with hindsight I suspect this could have been dealers trying to ensure their customers didn’t try other dealers’ products,’ said one former drug user.
‘The friend I travelled to South America with said that the great thing about cocaine is that it isn’t addictive at all and that’s why it is a really good (and expensive) drug. Not sure if this is “folklore”, but it is pretty stupid,’ said a 21-year-old student living in Canberra who has tried marijuana.
Only a few reported actively researching the drug they were taking. One person said they checked websites like www.pillreports.com, a global database that gathers information about the quality and safety of particular ecstasy pills which are on the market, identified by colour, design and where they have been sold.
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On the night of the Mardi Gras dance party, as the shift of the rovers I was following drew to an end, we passed another pair of rovers—two women guiding towards the medical tent a young guy who even with their assistance was only just walking, his eyes rolling back in his head.
A metaphor sometimes applied to airports popped into my mind: ‘The Theatre of Security’. This is the concept that all the infuriating, time-consuming checks we go through to board an aircraft—the X-ray screening and the iris recognition technology, the taking off of shoes in the search for the one-in-a-billion shoe bomb—is an elaborate charade intended to make us feel better, and will never stop a concerted attempt at a terrorist attack.
I can’t help feeling there is something similar going on here, something like ‘The Theatre of Safety’—the illusion that bright vests, walkie-talkies and first-aid tents can render unsafe behaviour safe. Watching the young guy with the rolling eyes as he was guided to medical help I reflected that of course first aid can only achieve so much. Even if you have all the medical attention in the world, you can still do yourself serious damage if you take too much, or the wrong drug, or even a tiny bit of a drug which doesn’t agree with you.
Then again, if something does go wrong, this party is the place you would want to be. Back in the shed, which is the command post for the rovers, the next shift was being briefed. It was all so formal, and so organised.
It is no surprise that these efforts to make risky behaviour as safe as possible have come from the gay community, which has an enterprising history in the area of safety and health. Probably because they know they cannot rely on politicians and police to look after their best interests, they look to each other. They are less likely to take anything for granted.