If You Get Too Close To The Fire, You Get Burned

Discotheques are wonderful places, and raves are even wonderfuller, and mega-raves must be as close to heaven as one can get on this Earth. So it's interesting to look at LA, where everyone apparently has adamant and diametrically opposed points of view about how to regulate heaven so it doesn't hurt and kill people, and wonder if there are better ways to do this:

The megaraves are nothing like the more modest, nonpermitted warehouse raves, which, ironically, many Coliseum commissioners — including L.A. City Councilman Bernard Parks and L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky — oppose. But now all raves, even the smaller ones, might suffer, thanks to the Coliseum Commission's inability to control mobs at the Coliseum and Sports Arena.

Last week, California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, a San Francisco Democrat, introduced legislation to ban raves on public property and require that private events be licensed.

Ma cited the deaths at Electric Daisy and the Cow Palace: "In June a 15-year-old girl died and over 100 people were hospitalized. If I was on the [Coliseum Commission], I would not have made the decision to do this again." And she slammed the "big money" that's driving public officials to push for mass events at L.A.'s two huge, taxpayer-owned venues.

"One of the things that's most impressive is the volume of patients all coming at one time," says Marc Futernick, director of emergency services at downtown's California Hospital Medical Center, which received about 70 medical transports from Electric Daisy. "It has been horrible every year." ... Some medical professionals said the casualties were like those seen in war.

...The Coliseum Commission won't disclose how much it reaped from rave fees last year. But the money has turned straitlaced politicians into scolds who wave off the warnings of concerned medical professionals.

"We are under financial stress this year that we were not under last year," explains commission President Barry Sanders, who backs the raves, speaking at the board's December meeting.

...But Rotella scored a PR triumph at the hearing. The officials, who had never been to raves, began calling them "festivals." Then they voted unanimously to continue embracing them.

...Marcus Gaede, 27, from the slightly older crowd that's outgrowing E, is an electronic dance-music aficionado. He became an anti-Ecstasy crusader after coming across a dying girl at the 2007 Halloween rave Monster Massive at the Coliseum Commission-controlled Sports Arena, near USC.

..."For over 35 minutes we were waiting with a security guard for medical attention," he says. "Her mouth was, like, wired shut and she was, like, choking on the water. She was going to drown. ... As the drugs kept taking more effect, she started having seizures."

...Veteran L.A. rave promoter Tef Foo, who got his start promoting raves and techno clubs 20 years ago, says dangerous drug use has subsided. But at L.A.'s government-backed raves, "They lease out booths to concession people — the guy who sells the T-shirts and the glow-in-the-dark items and all that stuff," he says, and many booth operators are "the source of drugs."

...[Former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer Trinka Porrata] says she's seen security guards let partygoers in for a cash bribe in return for not checking their backpacks. She taped video footage of "drug deal after drug deal" inside a Coliseum rave, and estimates that about 85 percent of rave crowds are taking Ecstasy or other drugs.

...The politicos' ignorance about megaraves plays a key role in their embrace of the events. Essentially, the oldsters on the Coliseum Commission think county-backed megaraves are concerts, just bigger. And some of them bristle as the deaths and bad PR mount on their watch. L.A. City Councilman Parks, the former LAPD chief of police, who supports the government-backed events, is so defensive now that he stops people in midsentence if they call them raves.

...Johnston and other docs understand something that Sanders, Parks, Knabe, Yaroslavsky and the other commissioners don't seem to grasp: Many new, young ravers don't comprehend the dangers of Ecstasy, displaying a level of ignorance that's a big change within the rave culture. Jonathan Fielding, who runs the county Department of Health, says, "Over the last four or five years, concern about Ecstasy has gone down. You have a new generation of people who haven't learned from the prior one."

...But Yaroslavsky and his commission colleagues hold to the "harm reduction" theory that if kids are going to do bad things, adults should be there to supervise and catch them when they fall. "What I'm inclined to do is to de-rave the raves, and take as much of the rave aspect out of the electronic-music concerts and emphasize the music," Yaroslavsky says.

...But at least the all-night parties allow some people to sober up, former officer Porrata says. Shutting them down at midnight, as Yaroslavsky has proposed, would thus be a bad idea, she says — another example of how out of touch the Coliseum Commission members are.

...The politicians who say their embrace of megaraves provides safe havens for kids who would be in danger at smaller events are "full of crap — they're completely full of crap," says former LAPD narcotics cop Porrata. "Most of the kids end up laying around on the ground," she says. "There are such masses of them it's hard to even see what's going on. The vast majority of them are on drugs."

...Barkett says there's no factual foundation for the "safe haven" theory. "It was felt it was in the best interest of society to have these events in places that have the best preventative measures," but after seeing the Ecstasy ODs at the Cow Palace in Daly City, he told his board of directors he was "unable to tell you with any confidence that any increased level of security or other measure will prevent these kinds of overdoses from occurring."