Party Vibe

you will also have to be prepared for counter-attacks from the anti-drugs movement, including them scrutinising the lifestyles and activities of those who criticises them. Normal journalists do this to each other all the time, as do cops and politicians, and there are already “concerned citizens” poking and prying into others activities.

Those who are prepared to judge others must be prepared to be judged themselves.

A small amount of personal drug use is hardly a crime, but people exposing journalists, cops and civil servants for lying will have to be careful they cannot be exposed themselves for any other serious moral transgressions such as theft, fraud, violence, infidelity etc.

your enemy has friends as well who will back them up….

with regard to crime reporting – most reports on drugs and overdoses come under this category, even the most shit media outlets do not fabricate the details of victims/casualties – they will get in trouble for doing so. There are also some strict privacy rules the Police and NHS have about reporting the details of crime victims and hospital patients. by and large, the media play by these rules if begrudgingly. Even in the days when they used radio scanners to stalk the emergency services at incidents this wasn’t used to form the main bit of the story, and isn’t possible now anyway with the Airwave radios.

What the media do often do is speculate on as actual causes of death and overplay the risks of fatal overdoses – OTOH in some cases HM Coroner deliberately spins verdicts out of sympathy to the family – if they can say that someone was “ill” and that this illness was the main cause of their death rather than drugs (as opposed to it being 50% of each) they will do so to try and keep someones good name.

hence a lot of narrative/open verdicts which leave the media able to increase the speculation and anti-drugs publicity.

with regard to protests and raves there’s a a wildly differeing amount of wider public support for these minority activities. however even the Met now admit their public order policing is a shambles due to complacency and a lack of training, I’ve had it confirmed from several independent sources that the Eastern constabularies are now teaching them how to deal with large hostile crowds due to their successes in closing down illegal raves.

also realistically there isn’t a country in the world where the Police are going to allow themselves to be defied once they are in “public order formation” (riot squad). what should be debated instead is the circumstances and trigger points where the cops change from being normal “bobbies” into the formations to clear an area.

ironically, there have been many protests in EA which have gone ahead without any major trouble or injuries whatsoever, from the usual anti-war/anti-nuke ones at airbases and Sizewell, to more localised ones against post office closures outside Stowmarket and an animal sanctuary being closed at Felixstowe. However in London its actually hard to tell exactly what the protesters want, and a lot of their campaigns are duplicated by more non-confrontational postitive things which the Transition movement are already carrying out!

with raves the issues are more complex. There is a wider popular consensus that its perfectly acceptable to use reasonable force to defend private property – even amongst those with relatively progressive political views. most unlicensed raves held today are attended by (and organised by) hedonistic youth who simply do not want the burden of paperwork associated with putting on a licensed event, rather than people with a long term desire to make society a better place…

in the case of many rural raves on private farms the counterargument (which is not without truth) is that the farmers are often elderly folk who are simply too intimidated to challenge the organisers. yes they often have younger relatives (sons in particularly) who are not so intimidated, but this leads to a increasing spiral of vigilanté incidents and reprisals which could erupt into long term feuds.

Hence Police are called to try and discourage this activity, with them using force to clear the invaded farms and/or confiscating sound equipment to create a financial loss to the organisers – in the hope they will eventually realise it works out cheaper to get permission and a license! If they remain stubborn and sell drugs to replace the confiscated kit this is a serious criminal offence in itself and the cops will deploy anti-organised crime resources.

its a less clear cut situation with places like Thetford and Rendlesham Forest, much of which is owned by the citizen taxpayers of the UK and EU. I do think there is a case for permitting well-run events there on condition there isn’t excessive environmental damage, but there are still other short and long term burdens on society caused by the night time economy (legal or unlicensed), an increasing amount of incidents at these events (fights/fires/RTCs), the risk that if events were permitted that organisers from other areas would try to muscle in (unless other tolerance zones were set up at the same time), and in any case its unfair to expect non-participants to subsidise others fun…