A Crime Scene?
I’m a member of the Drug Policy Alliance and have supported their efforts to stop the “War on Drugs” (which is really a war on people who use them, not on the drugs themselves). They’ve just issued an action alert about attempts to close down dance clubs, arrest patrons, and punish people who go to such clubs because….some people who go to clubs use illegal drugs.
I was reminded of the attacks on Rave parties when I was living in Britain. Although some Rave parties (for the record, I’ve never attended one) evidently did cause problems for farmers whose fields were trampled, those cases can easily be handled by normal trespass law. Instead, the parliament passed a law banning the playing of certain syncopated beats, in an attempt to ban the music that attracted the partygoers, in a demonstration of how bad policy tends to generate concentric waves of bad policies.
They’re less radical in their approach than I am, but I endorse the work of the Drug Policy Alliance to end the war on civil society being waged under the rubric of the “War on Drugs.” (In fact, I just sent them a modest donation.)
An early Autechre EP, “Anti,” was created in response to parliament’s authoritarianism. My boys wrote on the cover: “Warning: Lost and Djarum contain repetitive beats. We advise you not to play these tracks if the Criminal Justice Bill becomes law. Flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played at both forty five and thirty three revolutions per minute. However, we advise DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harrassment. (…) Autechre is politically non-aligned. This is about personal freedom.”
There was a club here in Santa Cruz that had to shut down, because the Feds were clamping down on raves, so it’s not just in Britain. Of course, with our wonderful regulatory apparatus in the US, the BATF, DEA and FBI can go a long way with these things without congressional endorsement.