By Garry Glass

Our desire to dance in large rooms with others into the small hours with the preferred cocktail of psychoactive compounds pumping through our brains continues to be criminalised. By prohibiting psychoactive drugs and licensing premises such that a curfew is effectively imposed, our options to party are hindered.

Curfew and Prohibition

Authorities sanction one rather problematic form of intoxication and criminalise all others. The state assumes the role of cartographer of acceptable states of mind, it insists upon its version of mundane reality. The work week and curfew licensing appoints certain times and locations where social life takes place. States of mind and contexts for encounter are subject to intervention by social engineers. Under the rubric of public health and public order they do not want a repeat of the rave generation.

Legislation specifically aimed at the UK counter-cultural in the last generation:

If we choose to take some substance that is surely our prerogative and any imposition to the contrary is laughable in the extreme. Indeed those who assume to deny us this quite basic freedom do us violence despite the masquerade of concern. At best this is the nanny state but there is perhaps a wider strategy of containment and isolation of the counterculture.    

This is not a society which encourages fully nocturnal lifestyles for the most part. Licensing rules mean that there is a soft curfew in place on the population in towns and cities, limiting the ability to continue socialising in public into the small hours. Whilst there are exceptions where late licences are granted, there is great discrepancy between local authorities. Anti-social behaviour laws can be used to raid and shut down house parties if neighbours complain about noise.

The regulation of sleeping patterns through the imposed curfew and the demands of the working week conspire to make us miss most sunrises. In a society sleepwalking into catastrophe, simply staying up talking about your dreams until the light dawns becomes a defiant act.

The closing of large venues like The Arches and Fabric on public health grounds are emblematic of a generalised assault on the dance subculture ongoing since a generation.

As tragic as the small number of club deaths are they hardly provide justification for such an infringement upon our civil-liberties. The idea that the state is demonstrably willing and able to prevent promoters from playing certain styles of music to a room full of people is terrifyingly draconian.

This is not to ignore the mental health concerns of drug addiction. At the end of the day there are costs and benefits. It is surely up to individuals to make their own choices and accept the consequences. The idea that one’s body and psyche are the jurisdiction of state authority is such an intolerable inference that it cannot be entertained seriously. The denial of our right to party as we like leads to antagonism because it prevents us meeting each other in contexts of our own design thus limiting the ways we might encounter each other more fully.

Free parties

Free parties are a grassroots movement which bypasses the restrictions of the legal club scene and can be viewed as a political statement of self-organisation at a distance from the State. They are characterised by the open use of illegal recreational drugs, lack of entrance fee and music which is often much faster, louder and goes on for much longer than is generally permitted by local authorities.

The Teknivals are a conglomeration of these free party sound-systems in free festivals which can attract tens of thousands of ravers across Europe. The 2016 Teknival in France saw 13,000 ravers party on the grounds of the riot police training barracks on the May Day weekend when police were diverted to the Nuit debout protests in Paris and across France.

The word Curfew literally derives from “to put out the fires”. When we Rave it is as though we keep those metaphorical fires burning. Electronic music is about the interplay of utopia and dystopia, in the reactionary times we live in it affords a cultural expression to these feelings. Free parties are effectively a kind of union for unemployed workers. They take place on the fringes of Capital, amongst the ruin of post-industrial Britain and out in the countryside. In pursuit of a life beyond capitalism some are given to the exploration of suitable habitats where our worlds may meet, to overcome atomisation through social encounter. Bonding is anathema to the state unless it can be managed for it is in these webs of relationships that we can find mutual aid and solidarity. Whereas a demonstration is largely on the side of legality, unlicensed parties of any size exist beyond the bounds of normal social convention. They make for excellent places to experiment with the ways reality may be perceived.

Illegal raves used to attract tens of thousands of people. This is comparable to the miners strikes or other major public order situations like those outside the bank of England in 2009 or Westminster in 2011. Authorities have been quick to control the power of social media in bringing crowds together for a repeat to these free parties. The reason is fairly simple, it’s a numbers game in terms of police being able to effectively manage a crowd. Raves were radical because of the sheer number of people who were willing to break the law coming together in one place. For them rebellion and partying were synonymous.

Party as protest

The London Orbital parties in the early 1990s saw a form of DIY party-protest culture which precipitated Reclaim The Streets and anti-capitalist carnivals such as J18. The more recent Climate camp and Occupy movements are to a significant extent rooted in this squatting, travelling and free partying tradition. The war on drugs is about empowering the police to criminalise communities of resistance. Repression of the UK counter culture peaked during the criminal justice bill protests in 1994.

In 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public order act was brought into law giving police the remarkable power to stop music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Part of its provisions dealt specifically with removing the right to assemble and listen to amplified music. This was fiercely resisted by the ‘Advance Party’, an alliance of people campaigning for the rights of people involved in the ‘rave’ and free music festival scene. Fear of organised crime and drug deaths at raves were used as a rationale for criminalisation but those in the scene knew that their way of life that was under attack. Despite a demonstration of 40,000 people in London which descended into riot in the run up, the draconian bill passed into law. Free parties continue in defiance but the police do have substantial powers in terms of shutting down assembly. Clubbing became legal and profit oriented after that, dance music became mainstream and its raw hedonism was sanitised and captured for the glitzy soundtrack of a new post-political generation.

Millennial weekend culture did not lead to a break from wage slavery but its affirmation as the job paid for the weekend. Our relationships are subject to commodification as we spend money just to hang out with our friends in a club.

Raves were a high watermark in the growth of DIY culture and a concrete demonstration of the power of large numbers of self organised people. It must be possible to go beyond nostalgia and continue to keep these temporary autonomous zones open long enough to inspire curiosity as to what other worlds are possible.

These states of mind are not that useful to capital in that one may be given to consider matters more pertinent like the evolution of life on earth and the wider universe and so on. MDMA is known to enhance empathy, open communication and bonding. The widespread use of Ecstasy contributed to the decline in football violence in the 90s. Divide and rule was faltering.

Coffee was banned in Mecca in 1511 when the governor believed it encouraged sedition and radical thinking. It is not so tenuous an analogy to see the bounds of our own critical thinking determined by the modern prohibition of psycho-actives. For those acquainted with the effects of drugs there is really little question that they lead to a curiosity and questioning of reality which is anathema to indoctrination and mass hysteria.

Ban on Legal Highs

The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 is a blanket ban on every substance which can affect your state of mind except the ones which are already major taxable commodities. This arbitrary criminalisation disregards evidence based policy making in order to appease the Tory electorates’ fascistic proclivities. It was brought in to tackle the problem of people inventing novel chemical analogues to replace already banned substances.

Drugs most commonly used at parties are MDMA, Ketamine, LSD, Psilocybin, DMT. The evidence of the therapeutic value these drugs have for treating a range of mental health problems is undisputed, however their use for recreation is at higher doses.

Aldous Huxley insisted human beings would come to see alcohol as an inferior drug. If there were a greater repertoire of drugs available the problems of alcohol would at least be mitigated by the choice of less harmful states to be in.

The government’s own drugs advisor Dr David Nutt was unceremoniously sacked after reiterating research findings which showed that Ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than Tobacco and Alcohol. These statements were not in the spirit of the government’s agenda, this led to a walkout by the whole of Dr Nutt’s department on the grounds its recommendations were being ignored.

Governments are lobbied heavily by the drinks industry and despite the well established risks, alcohol advertising is all too common. Alcohol culture facilitates what is in effect a massive subsidy to the drinks industry because the costs are externalised to the emergency services, damaged livers and broken lives. The mass lobotomy which results from the industrial scale production and consumption of the depressant seems endemic to the culture. Drinking is almost mandatory in politics regardless of tendency. We are governed by drunks and a staggering third of the middle class drinks too much. The litany of violence and domestic abuse is quite unfathomable yet it remains the only inebriate of common resort. Clubs are not renewed licenses because of drug related deaths yet alcohol related deaths don’t seem to be leveraged in quite the same way despite the death toll being orders of magnitude greater.

Drug related deaths at parties more common than they should be due to a lack of consistent quality, lack of experience or attention when dosing, mixing drugs, re-dosing before the full effects come on, the use of untested novel drugs, the taking of unlabeled “mystery drugs”, taking in combination with alcohol and dehydration. These risks are not that difficult to manage if you find yourself in a culture where taking drugs is not still taboo.

Drug related deaths are sensationalised in order to justify ideologically driven prohibitions. The reality is that people will take drugs if they can get their hands on them. Harm reduction through supporting drugs quality testing in clubs would save lives. In Berlin the club scene is a lot more progressive with clubs open all night and drug testing commonplace. The London Metropolitan Police are currently driving partying underground, whilst other authorities such as Manchester are more tolerant.

Festivals offer us temporary escape, a kind of pressure release valve from the otherwise mundane life possible under Capital. This fact is not lost on the capitalists themselves who somehow manage to destroy everything that is sacred in culture. What we are left with is a kind of landscape where our most creative aspirations continue to be appropriated and sold back to us and where what was once good becomes a desperate parody of itself. 

There are great examples of resistance. Nuit debout is a youth protest movement which assembles at night across France. By combining street partying with direct action they are confronting neoliberalism and giving the cops a run for their money. Halloween in London last year saw riot police deployed to break up a squat party only to retreat after sustained resistance from revellers. Up and down the country there are smaller free parties happening, just follow the music.

Though it does transgress certain societal norms, going out and getting fucked up is not in and of itself a revolutionary act. Finding our own space and developing our own languages where a community can find each other could be. The laws were brought in because the drugs and music were too socially explosive but for this same reason rave culture will see its renaissance.

#upallnight

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