Earlier this month, I attended a family-friendly music festival in the glorious sunshine. There was stone-baked pizza, a champagne bar and paddle board yoga. There was also quite a lot of ecstasy, ketamine and cocaine.
You cannot attend a music festival – even a supposedly wholesome one – without realising how normalised drugs have become among my generation of middle class young professionals. The mention of Class A drug use may conjure images of single-use phones, street corners and sneaking into the toilets – there was none of that. Cheery, well-spoken dealers offered my friends and me their wares as we sunbathed outside our tent; by the stage, fellow attendees snorted lines for all to see.
Nearly a quarter of festival-goers admit to taking drugs – when you factor out the families and the liars, that means everyone has at the very least seen someone else getting high. Many festival organisers have all but given up trying to prevent punters from using drugs, and have switched their focus to harm reduction: several festivals now provide testing tents, where attendees can take their substances to be sampled for purity before deciding how much to take.
The Tab, the online student newspaper, recently published an article on ‘how to survive a festival this summer,’ which includes advice on managing an ecstasy comedown alongside telling you to pack some cereal bars and a raincoat.
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