♪
-We need to stop the raves.
It's not a safe place for your kids.
-In the '90s, what many young people crave is
an all-night music and drug-fueled rave.
-Everything about it was a middle finger to authority.
-Until all these good vibes...
[ Girls yelling ]
-Raves, celebrated hedonism and pleasure.
-...provoke authorities to harsh the partygoers buzz.
-I think that made politicians uncomfortable.
It made parents uncomfortable.
-Bulldoze it down.
-The government cracks down.
-They made ecstasy out to look like it was crack.
-The biggest fear is that one of these parties
will turn tragic.
-Promoters are scared to death
for fear of getting raided.
-Criminals prey on fun-seeking ravers.
-These guys came to kill me. Straight up Mafia style.
-And the bright, naive promise of the rave movement...
-People just letting their freak flag fly.
-...gets twisted into something darker
and more sinister. -It was exactly the opposite
of peace, love, unity and respect.
♪
-Young adults and teens, many of them underage,
find their way into this secret world.
Take a look at what makes kids crave the rave.
-In the ,'90s. America is getting turned on
to a new kind of midnight to pass sunup party.
-Sometimes outdoors, sometimes in warehouses.
Typically illegal.
-It's about the lights. It's about the atmosphere.
-Raves deliver the opportunity for sex...
-It was a pretty hedonistic environment.
-...mood-enhancing drugs.
-Without ecstasy, this would have
never happened the way it did. Impossible.
-...and an innovative musical soundtrack.
[ Rave music plays ]
-The dance music is just a catalyst for all these things.
-It becomes an ideal setting for young people
seeking an alternative to mainstream conformity.
-The early raves were like the Noah's Ark of every kid
that didn't really fit in in high school.
-Everybody thinks that we just do drugs here.
It's not for the drugs, really, it's for, you know, together.
-I do think that raves felt a bit transgressive.
-They were a reaction to what was going on
in the broader culture.
-So tell me, is this a lifestyle
or just a moment in time?
-It's a lifestyle and a moment in time.
-But this lifestyles moment in time
can be traced back to an innovation in the early 1980s.
-Introducing the world's most advanced rhythm machine.
The Roland TR-800.
-Roland's user-friendly electronic drum machine
helps launch a revolution in contemporary music.
-So-called house music was first made
in the creators houses,
but it was also performed at clubs called
The Warehouse and Powerhouse.
-Wannabe music producers now have a cheap
and easy way to produce electronic music,
and it quickly takes over makeshift dance venues
in cities like Chicago.
-They started playing house music
at this Michigan Avenue hotel and health club
last summer and they've been packing them in ever since.
-Around the same time, techno music begins in Detroit.
I'm Michaelangelo Matos,
I'm the author of "The Underground Is Massive:
How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America."
♪
On the one hand, you've got song-based house music
with women singing powerfully over it.
♪
And then on the other, there's this sort of
synth heavy, non-vocal,
sample-heavy techno music.
♪
-But the creation of house and techno
is only half of rave's origin story.
The other is how a mood-lifting pharmaceutical known as MDMA
finds its way into US nightclubs.
-If you want to start back at 1914, um,
that's when MDMA was patented.
I'm Julie Holland, I'm a psychiatrist,
and in the '90s I was a medical student,
and then I was a resident at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Also, I was going to raves.
Alexander Shulgin is a chemist who in the '70s
was really interested in various psychedelics.
He had been testing on himself,
and he felt like MDMA would be really useful
for processing trauma.
-It turned out to be particularly good
for couples therapy.
It creates this enormous sense of empathy,
like, you're worst enemies and now you're best friends.
♪
My name is Frank Owen, and in the 1990s
I became an investigative reporter
probing the dark underbelly of club culture.
It was like a year's worth of therapy in a pill.
And so that leads to an idea that if everybody takes it,
then everybody will be on the same wavelength.
Everybody will love each other.
-And who doesn't want to love each other?
MDMA's promise to spread good feelings,
helps drive recreational demand,
and production of the drug ramps up to meet it.
MDMA also gets a street rebrand.
The drug is now referred to as ecstasy.
-People were dancing all night and taking this drug,
they were buying it with credit cards.
they were even being charged like sales tax.
And so more and more people were taking this drug,
which was not yet illegal.
-Good evening. -But in the early '80s,
some grown ups want to stop the fun.
-Drugs are menacing our society.
They're threatening our values
and undercutting our institutions.
-And when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.
-Good morning. -The DEA responds with
emergency scheduling hearings
to determine the legal fate of the popular new party drug.
-MDMA, or by the street name ecstasy.
Under emergency controls and Schedule One.
-The DEA's own administrative law judge
thought it should be in Schedule Three.
That would mean that research could be done,
but people couldn't use it recreationally.
And the DEA basically said, you know,
"Thank you for your advice,
but we're just going to keep it in Schedule One."
-Schedule One means MDMA is now classified,
like LSD and heroin, as a drug with high potential for abuse.
-The only thing that making it illegal
did was stymie clinical research.
They didn't really stop any recreational use.
-Especially with the crowd in the '80s
most attracted to house music.
-House music becomes very popular with older black
or Hispanic crowds and gay crowds.
House music becomes very entrenched
in the gay dance scene.
♪
-In 1986 at New York's famous Paradise Garage,
Frank Owen gets his first taste of combining
house music and ecstasy.
-It was like nothing I'd ever experienced before.
♪
It was the combination of music, drugs,
the sense of acceptance, the sense of community.
I'm this white limey with long hair,
and they were like, "As long as you're here to dance,
you're welcome," you know?
And that was what I fell in love with.
♪
-But this precursor for rave culture
remains underground in the US,
in part because of 1980s homophobia
fueled by the Aids crisis.
-The longest time, ecstasy continues to be a gay drug.
Straight boys didn't take ecstasy
'cause they thought it would turn you gay, basically.
That was the rumor, right?
-But house music-loving Europeans
don't share these stereotypes.
-That music begins to get popular in Europe
in the mid to late '80s.
♪
In 1987, a number of British DJs go to the island of Ibiza
and they encounter a DJ named Alfredo
who is playing in an open-air, all-night club called Amnesia.
And these DJs take MDMA.
♪
And they dance all night to this music.
The MDMA opens them up
and becomes a sort of bonding agent with the music.
-When these DJs return home, they start throwing parties,
openly advertising the music and ecstasy to attract crowds.
-You don't need to take ecstasy to understand the music,
but if you did a good pill of MDMA,
and in those days it was medical-grade,
and then with this music, it just locks you in.
All right, what's up? My name is DJ Frankie Bones
from Brooklyn, New York City.
Original rave pioneer of rave culture in America.
And here we are. We're going to discuss a few things.
♪
You get locked into the groove
and, just, people would just dance all night long.
Almost like it was manufactured in a sense
to start this huge thing called rave.
-In Britain, suffering from a severe economic downturn,
young people gravitate to this new kind of party
that can be enjoyed with only a decent pair of dancing shoes
and their purchase of some low-cost MDMA.
-It becomes pop culture within a year.
All of a sudden, everybody wants to dance all night
to this crazy minimalist music while rolling on MDMA.
-And it transformed youth culture
practically overnight in Britain.
-What starts in established nightclubs
quickly spreads to almost any place
that can power a massive sound system
and accommodate a large group of people.
-Sometimes outdoors, sometimes in warehouses.
-It was very anti-authoritarian.
It was happening in illegal spaces.
It was mysterious.
Even the music was breaking the rules
of what music was supposed to sound like.
-These renegade parties evolve a new name -- raves.
And the social movement becomes so widespread
that by 1988 and '89,
the MDMA-fueled phenomenon is dubbed
the second Summer of Love.
-And that's the culture that really takes off in Britain.
Instead of going out to the pub on a Friday night,
you go to a rave.
-And they become huge. 20,000 people going to these things.
-And it was amazing time, like, if you look at videos
of the UK in '89,
people are having the time of their lives, you know?
♪
-And soon, DJs and producers in the US
making house music are getting calls
from their counterparts across the pond.
-Me and Tommy Musto --
we we were a group called Musto and Bones
for a little while, and, um,
probably around May or June of 1989,
we get a phone call from an agency in London asking if,
uh, Tommy and me want to come over there
to DJ these things called raves.
And, you know, "We want to bring you over to play in August.
Would you guys want to come over?"
So we were like...
"Hell yeah."
And it was like the first time
two American guys were playing
at one of these events, right?
And, um, we became really big,
really fast in the UK.
So I basically was going to London
once a month for the rest of that year.
-But it's his trip in September
that is most memorable.
-You have 20,000 people in cars
trying to get to this aircraft hangar in Ipswich, right?
The cops were trying to stop this event from happening.
The police had it all blocked off,
but over a period of five hours,
we had to turn the car around on country roads.
You'd be like on a one lane, you know, country road
and somebody would be out of their cars telling you,
"You got to turn around and go back this way."
It was like a wild goose chase to get to this place.
-It's during this rave road trip
that Frankie first tries ecstasy.
-We're on some country road with dead traffic.
Nobody's moving, and, you know,
this is like in the early days of ecstasy,
I-I heard about ecstasy. I didn't know what it was.
I had not tried it yet.
Did, like, my first pill.
-And then, playing from neighboring cars,
Frankie experiences what it's like
to hear house music while on MDMA.
But not just any house music.
-I had my one song coming out of one car
and another song coming out of another car,
and, like, to have this kind of experience
where you're in a foreign country,
just somewhere you know,
that you never thought you would be,
and your music's coming out of two different cars
at the same time, I mean, I kind of melted down
in the back of this car.
[ Laughter, overlapping voices]
♪
-Frankie finally arrives at the rave near daybreak.
-It was one of the most awesome experiences of my life
because when you're in a, like, an aircraft hanging
with 17,000 people,
it was all love, and it was black and white,
and everything under the sun,
and it was all about the music and...
wow, it was just amazing.
-And he's inspired to bring that experience back to the States.
-Nobody in America knew what rave was,
and rave became like my, uh --
my calling, really.
-And as the '90s begin, he's not alone.
Rave will become a hot new product,
but the utopian ideals of the movement
will prove to have a short shelf life.
-I thought that ecstasy and dance music
would change the world, you know?
But what it ended up as was exactly the opposite of peace,
love, unity, and respect.
-Here are a few of 1990s Pop chart toppers.
-As the '90s begin, teens in the US
are craving something new.
-Pop culture by the late '80s is just turgid.
You turn on the radio and it's just, like,
Paula Abdul and power ballads.
Alternative rock hadn't really blown up,
hip-hop was only beginning to blow up,
and dance music was, like, the other thing
that was really active and interesting at that point.
-So when young urban Americans learned their counterparts
in the UK are commandeering buildings
to throw unauthorized music and drug-powered parties,
they're like, "Sign us up."
♪
-In terms of warehouse raves,
in terms of breaking into a building,
that really starts to happen in '89
and it starts to happen kind of simultaneously
on the East and West coast.
LA is, from the beginning, the biggest scene.
-LA had two things,
and a bunch of British ex-pats
who were traveling back and forward to London,
and they had a bunch of warehouses.
-And the growing LA scene soon booked someone
they think is a big name talent from Britain.
-I wound up getting a booking in Los Angeles June 1, 1990,
and when I get off the plane and they hear
I have a New York accent,
they were like, "Who are you?"
They thought they were duped.
I'm like, "I'm Frankie Bones," it's like,
"Wait a minute, aren't you from the UK?"
If they knew I was from Brooklyn,
I would have never got the gig.
-Frankie soon learns he's made a deal with young devils
in the City of Angels. -They taught me
how to break into warehouses
where you cut the locks off the gate,
you put your own lock on the gate
on a Saturday or Sunday,
and you come back Thursday or Friday.
If your lock's still on the gate,
you know you can throw a party there
'cause nobody's going to come check up on you.
-But back in New York, to attract a crowd
to what he'll call storm rave,
he needs a source for ecstasy.
So Frankie reaches out to folks he met in England.
-I met a few people in the UK
that were very interested in bringing ecstasy to New York.
I'm not a drug dealer in any size, shape, or form,
but I was like, "Well, if -- if I could meet with your people,
I'll put them on with my people."
I didn't even know who my people were at that point.
But, um, I wound up getting like 2,000 pills
to start the scene in New York City.
-And he was basically the person
who introduced ecstasy to straight kids.
♪
-When I got that first delivery of ecstasy,
like we started giving pills to people,
the word just spread really quickly.
It just kept doubling in size until we did 5,000 people.
♪
These parties would go to noon the next day,
whereas the club traditionally closed at 4 a.m.
We're out there watching the sunrise, you know,
looking at the city across the water
and just playing this music.
Anybody that came to one of these parties
knew something special was going on in 1990 and '91.
-In December of 1991,
Details publishes a major feature by Legs McNeil
about the making of a party in LA at a water park.
And all over the US, people read this and that's their blueprint.
-By 1993, there was a rave
in every city across America, you know?
And so the whole country by '93 was raving.
-Especially underage teens who have no other place to party.
-Rave becomes a thing for kids who can't get into clubs.
It's not for adults, it's a DIY kid thing.
-So I started going to raves in LA when I was 13.
♪
I'm Vivian Host, I also go by DJ Star Eyes.
I'm a DJ, producer, party promoter,
music journalist, podcast host,
and in the '90s, I was raving my balls off.
Of course you're going to use that one. I'm going to hate it.
[ Laughs ]
♪
Back in the early '90s,
it was a lot more complicated
to go to a rave than it is now.
I used to go to this coffeehouse with my friend,
who was also 13, and there was a guy
that worked there that was 19,
and he took us to a rave in an unmarked white van.
It's like every parent's nightmare.
♪
I think I was kind of freaked out
'cause everybody was older than me,
I was definitely being offered nitrous balloons
and all kinds of drugs,
and I think it was a lot darker than what I was expecting,
but I kind of wanted more
so I kept going.
-Because for young ravers like Vivian,
these parties provide more than just house music and ecstasy.
They're a place to feel accepted.
-I never felt like I fit in with any
of the mainstream dominant culture.
I didn't have the right Guess genes and all of these things.
I wasn't a popular kid. I didn't play sports.
I didn't give a shit about any of that stuff, you know?
And rave was a place where I could, um,
you know, be myself.
I think acceptance of people
just letting their freak flag fly
and people that are different than you
is like a real core tenet of rave culture.
♪
-There was an ethos about how you were going to
behave in a rave.
You know, there was going to be a certain amount
of empathy and respect for each other.
-And that comes from the drug
that's most associated with rave, which is ecstasy.
♪
-As the scene grows, these rave ideals
evolve into a formal declaration.
-A little bit later on, you started to get
the rave values codified
into this term called PLUR.
-P-L-U-R.
-Peace. -Peace. -Peace. -Peace.
-Love. -Love. -Love.
-Unity. -Unity. -Unity.
-Respect. -Respect.
-It's just this idea that the rave community is one community.
You know, those are the rules. That's the ethos.
-And that was the sort of guiding light
for a lot of the early '90s parties.
It still kind of is the idea.
-But not every raver practices what they preach.
-This idea of PLUR that everybody's so nice at the rave,
like, it wasn't really like that.
[ Laughs ]
There was beautiful times on ecstasy,
but yeah, like, there was a lot of, um,
"creeperie" in the early '90s,
a lot of people taking advantage of other people,
a lot of promoters not paying people.
-In New York City, it's a new generation
of the long established underworld
that will target the rave scene.
-The avenue of the rave scene in New York
was that it grew among,
like, these Italian American street toughs.
-Rave's reliance on the drug ecstasy draws sharks.
-So we start to see the infiltration
of the criminal element into the rave scene,
or into the ecstasy scene, pretty early on
because they understood that,
"We can make a lot of money out of it."
-Especially a club promoter known as Lord Michael Caruso.
-Michael Caruso, you know, he was our buddy,
my, uh, close friend in the beginning.
What happened was, one, Michael wanted control
of the ecstasy thing in New York.
He wanted to be that guy,
and we put him up with all people.
They would come into New York City with pills.
They had to bring 10,000 at a time.
I didn't want to be, like, having
my people even hanging with that many.
So we let Lord Michael in on our side.
♪
-Lord Michael begins promoting a techno club night in Manhattan
he calls Future Shock.
-This Future Shock thing, it got really big, really quick.
-Future Shock draws a crowd that's attracted by the drugs
but is less interested in upholding PLUR.
-It was more like a soccer riot
that the rave, you know?
-You have all these Italian, you know,
the weightlifting guys, you know,
steroids and like, "Ahh!"
All aggressive. -All hugging each other
and saying, "I love you, man, I love you."
♪
-Future Shock also introduces Lord Michael to some guys
who share his ambitions.
-These gangsters start turning up.
He forms an alliance with them,
and they start robbing all the ecstasy dealers.
So they basically take over the ecstasy trade with violence,
gangsterism, kidnappings, home invasions.
I mean, they literally terrorized
the...out of people.
Yet at the same time, they pawned great shows.
He knew how to throw a great rave,
but he was also at the same time,
you know, basically the Al Capone of raves, you know?
-He basically wanted to be king of New York.
-And the wannabe King sees Frankie Bones as a threat.
-I came home from a storm rave one night.
Four guys, each one took a swing at my head.
These guys came to kill me.
-In May of 1992, the free, week long
Castlemorton Common Festival and Rave
draws up to 40,000 partygoers in the UK.
-And that was really like a wake up call, I guess,
for the British government and the British police.
-You know, when your kids are going out
every weekend to these raves and doing drugs,
it alarmed the government.
-The government responds by passing
the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act,
effectively outlawing raves across the country.
-If there was more than 20 people dancing in a location,
the police could come shut it down.
It was insane, and you had actually, like,
pretty big protests in the streets
against the Criminal Justice Bill.
-And all it did was basically push the culture
into the nightclubs. -And the scene explodes
on a more mainstream level.
In 1992, in the States, raves are still super underground.
♪
-And in Lord Michael Caruso's corner of the underground,
this wannabe ecstasy-kingpin is running the gangster playbook.
-If somebody did put on a rave
that coincided with one of his nights,
he would send his goons to beat the promoters up.
There's a famous story about Frankie Bones, right?
-I came home from a storm rave one night,
um, had groceries in my hand in a brown bag.
Four dudes come up right in front of my house
and I see a guy with a gun, and I see a guy with a baseball bat.
And I get whacked. It was straight up mafia style.
[ Groans ]
Four guys. Each one took a swing at my head.
A bat, a bat, a pistol whip, and a pistol whip.
And they were gone.
My ear was hanging off backwards, it was a mess.
When the police did the report, they were like,
"They only hit you in the head, and then they left.
They wanted to kill you." And I'm just like,
wow, this is, like --
I'm trying to promote a peaceful thing and this is what happens.
-But Frankie won't quit. -We had a party that weekend.
I had four holes in my head, like 290 stitches I had.
And I'm still DJing that weekend.
I still have scars on my head from it, so.
-Worse, he still wrestles with the belief
that he was betrayed by someone he once called a friend.
-These guys came to kill me
and they were contracted from Lord Michael,
who to this day will tell me, "No,
that's not how it went down, Bones."
-When Lord Michael's tough guy empire
collapses in the late '90s,
most people forget all about him, but not Frankie.
-And you know, I don't talk to him, but, like
you know, I think I got on the phone with him once,
and I said, "You know, the only reason
I'm speaking to you right now is because
I know what you did, and you tried to have me killed,
and I'm still here talking to you, so I'm cool."
♪
-Prince George's County Police are trying to put an end
to a dangerous craze before someone gets hurt.
-By 1992 and '93,
local authorities are finally waking up to some
of the dangers posed by large, clandestine raves.
-The biggest fear is that one of these parties
will turn tragic, not unlike the Happy Land Social Club fire
in New York, in which 87 people
jammed into a small dance hall were killed in a raging inferno.
-Introduces us to this very secret world.
-The rising popularity of raves
prompts local news stories,
which prompts local authorities to take an interest.
-And for the first time, Prince George's County shut down
a so-called rave party.
-But authorities don't really know
what's going on at these events.
-...he's found drugs at raves. -That ignorance becomes clear
when police in Wisconsin
finally decide to act. -...with the floor you'll find.
-There's a party that takes place in Milwaukee
that happens on Halloween.
It's called "Grave."
About a thousand kids go, and by all accounts,
there is lots of MDMA on the premises.
Drugs galore.
♪
The Milwaukee police decide to bust them for underage drinking.
♪
Guns out.
Everybody on the floor, they zip-cuffed 900 kids.
-The offense aiding and abetting the consumption of alcohol
in an unlicensed public setting.
-And they arrested 900 kids for drinking,
which none of them were doing, and they all beat the rap.
What the MPD didn't do was find any
of the enormous number of drugs on the premises,
because police just had no idea what they were doing.
They didn't know what MDMA was.
When the promoters went back to clean up the warehouse,
they found $10,000 worth of drugs stuffed
into the cracks of the walls.
♪
-The authorities obsession with stopping the consumption
of alcohol blinds them to a public health problem
in early raves that they could help solve
with some simple education.
-The people who are going to take ecstasy
and go to raves and dance all night,
they don't want alcohol for the most part,
so they're really only drinking water.
And the bars would sell water because how else
were they going to make their money?
Not everybody had the money for water,
so they'd be dancing for hours and hours
and getting overheated and not drinking any water.
And they would often need medical attention
because they were having heatstroke.
-Plus ecstasy Schedule One status makes scientific research
into its harmful effects all but impossible.
-If you don't know what's happening,
you can't give any good advice.
You know, you can't give harm reduction information
if you don't know what the harms are.
-Instead, unfounded speculation about the dangers
of ecstasy dominates mainstream discussions about the drug.
-Do you plan on having children, and if so,
do you think they're going to come out normal?
-Okay, this is the thing... -I was on a show called
"Jane Pratt" on Lifetime Television in 1993,
with some other ravers and DJs and producers.
I was out of medical school, I was a full-fledged MD.
-Does not drain your spinal fluid,
it does not cause Parkinson's.
And to the best of our knowledge, it does not cause
mutated babies. -Wait, wait a minute.
-As an experienced raver,
Dr. Holland becomes an outspoken advocate
for improved harm reduction and drug education about MDMA.
-What do you think it's therapeutic
Possibilities are. -You name it.
Pain control, hypnosis,
creative visualization, couple therapy.
-That was pretty early for MDMA.
I mean, a lot of people had never heard of raves.
They hadn't heard of ecstasy. -Depression.
We don't know. We haven't tried.
I'd like to see. [ Siren wailing ]
-And the lack of more detailed ecstasy research
is literally killing people.
-It was a mess. It was really a mess.
And people were dying.
Because turns out it's not just
that overheating is a problem with MDMA, with -- with ecstasy.
It was also that overhydrating was a problem.
-When teens start dying at raves,
taking too much ecstasy is often blamed
when the real cause of death is taking too much water.
-MDMA causes some water retention,
like if you haven't taken MDMA,
you can drink a gallon of water
and pee a gallon of water, basically.
If you have taken MDMA,
you won't be peeing out a gallon of water,
and you will essentially sort of drown your brain or your lungs
where you've got too much fluid, not enough salt.
And that creates a situation where you get seizures
and you can die.
-Tonight on "Frontline"... -But in the early '90s,
the drug is always the problem.
-We're losing the war on drugs.
More people are consuming drugs,
more violent crime associated with it,
more drugs coming across our border.
-Ravers are left to find their own DIY solutions.
-We all kind of had to figure this out for ourselves
and eventually the message got out.
"Keep cool, take breaks, don't overheat."
But also don't overhydrate.
Just drink fluids to replace
what you're losing from sweating.
I mean, it really had to come from the streets.
♪
-But as the '90s go on,
what's coming from the streets
will threaten the entire rave scene.
-What happened in '94 to '95 was all the good
MDMA started being cut with, like, bad drugs.
-And it's hard to pursue peace, love, unity, and respect
while you're dying from an unintended drug overdose.
-I was walking up this very dark staircase,
and then on either side there's just like
7 or 8 ketamine dealers,
and I was just like, "Wow,
this is -- there are more drug dealers than, like,
people in this party, like, what's going on?"
-Tens of thousands of people
are camped out in upstate New York
tonight for three days of music.
If the scene sounds familiar, so does the name Woodstock.
-The return of Woodstock in 1994
brings a side stage devoted
to electronic music called Rave Stock.
-I played this party
and it's, like, an amazing event to be a part of.
♪
This is where they were introducing rave to the masses,
pretty much. -And it works.
♪
-When we were doing Storm Rave,
the biggest party I did was 5,000 people in 1992.
Then by like '94, '95 there was 10,000 people parties.
-Music industry executives suddenly see rave music
as their next big thing.
-Alt rock is losing steam.
Kurt Cobain has killed himself,
Pearl Jam is shunning the spotlight,
Soundgarden is about to break up.
The music business is ready to push what they
are now calling electronica.
-Electronic music producers quickly become
industry superstars,
in part because their music has
other profitable commercial applications.
-It's the perfect music to sell crap to, right?
Because essentially it's soundtrack music.
You know what I mean? So fashion shows,
advertising Hollywood movies,
that's the way it becomes mainstream.
-But nothing kills a cool underground scene
like being accused of selling out
and God forbid, becoming popular.
-But when the San Diego Convention Center hosts
the underground party scene, rave is mainstream.
-The capitalism part of it was always there.
But bit by bit it starts to become more about the money
and the big business.
-It happened to hippie, it happened to punk.
I mean, it's like -- it gets co-opted, right?
It's not that it's a good or bad thing.
It's just a natural process of
how an underground culture becomes part of the mainstream.
-Even the drug dealers, you know what I mean?
They start off, like, just selling drugs to their friends
or whatever, and then they don't care what kind of drugs
they're selling because they're just trying to,
like, make a quick buck. -And the fastest way
to make more money is to charge the same
for a lower quality product.
-As more people heard about ecstasy and raves,
more people were interested in trying the drug.
And unfortunately, what happens when demand outstrip supply
is that you start getting counterfeit products
and the more popular the drug became,
the more you just didn't know what you were buying.
♪
-Starting in the mid '90s,
pills being sold as ecstasy
can no longer be trusted to contain much, if any, MDMA.
-Other things infiltrate, a lot of MDMA got cut with speed,
and that's kind of a real party killer, too.
Like, people are just speeding out of their skulls
and it becomes much more aggro and macho
and not as -- not as loving and not as fun.
♪
A lot more sneering, a lot less hugs.
-The lack of reliable ecstasy also leads many ravers
to experiment with other ways of getting high.
-Drugs are baked into this thing,
and what happens over time is that it stops just being about,
you know, MDMA as a bonding agent
and just starts to be kind of a free-for-all.
-So you start seeing people like, say, doing ecstasy,
but also combining them with cocaine or crystal meth
or GHB or Special K or even heroin.
♪
People start experimenting with all sorts of chemicals,
and it creates these very unpredictable cross reactions,
which completely changes the mood of the scene.
♪
-One of the darkest parts of rave was, like,
how many people have OD'd or died or, like,
had really bad drug experiences.
-I hit a point, I was stepping over the bodies
of 16 year olds freaking high on K.
You know what I mean? People were dying.
You know, that's not good. It wasn't good.
[ Heart beating rapidly ]
-I can't lie, it's, like, a huge part of the culture
and something that we've all experienced for ourselves
or, like, seeing other people go through,
you know?
[ Heart beating rapidly ]
-By the late '90s, bad drugs and bad behavior
are causing the rave scene to buckle under its own weight.
-15 people were hospitalized after overdosing on the drug, G.
And G poses an additional risk for young women.
Men slip them this lethal elixir as the newest date rape drug,
-Like, there's only so many years of this
that you can, like, endure.
By around '99, 2000, that's when it was just, like...
I don't know, like, way more parties sucked
and were sketchy, then were good.
-To see this world for ourselves,
"20/20" attended some raves with a hidden camera.
-Media concern about the dangers of drug use
at raves gains momentum.
-We didn't even get near the door before we were approached
to buy drugs. -Want some X?
Acid, Special K? -Then comes
the disastrous return of Woodstock in 1999.
♪
Though Woodstock is a mainstream rock concert,
rave music is now embedded into the event.
But unlike the peaceful version five years earlier,
this 30th anniversary festival descends into chaos.
♪
It's plagued by inadequate facilities,
a lack of security leads to riots,
multiple reported sexual assaults and four deaths.
For those already eyeing raves with suspicion,
it's association with the Woodstock disaster
confirms their worst fears.
-We're fortunate this morning to have with us
one of our allies in the law enforcement aspect
of the club drugs.
-Raves and so-called club drugs
draw the attention of the DEA.
-Law enforcement are convinced that the only reason
people go to raves is for drugs,
and that the only reason people put on raves
is to sell drugs.
-Ecstasy is dangerous, and dangerous people
are trying to convince our children to use it.
-Ecstasy, the peace and love drug
that helped launch the rave movement,
is specifically singled out,
despite possibly being the least dangerous drug
being consumed at the event. -More than 50 people
could face criminal charges today after a weekend rave.
-Starting in 2000, federal authorities cracked down hard
on the already declining rave scene.
-Like, someone sends out a memo to all the police
and is like, "America's youth is being destroyed.
We have to crack down on these things."
This becomes a focus of. like, the whole US police force.
-Raves also draw the attention
of a future president determined to turn on the lights
and the party and send the kids home.
-Arrest the promoter,
find a rationale unrelated to drugs.
-The rave that was kind of like the final nail
in the coffin of a scene that was already dying, basically.
-The media has played a role in glamorizing
this very dangerous drug. -In 2001,
the US Senate convenes a 10 years late hearing
into what they see as the scourge of ecstasy and raves.
-If I were governor of my state or mayor of my town,
I would be passing new ordinances relating to
stiff criminal penalties for anyone who held a rave.
-Joe Biden decided that he was like the anti-rave crusader
and trotted out this law from the 1980s.
-I'm the guy who authored the crack house legislation.
-The crack house law was,
if you own the property on which the drugs are being sold
or manufactured, you are responsible
for the criminal activity that goes on in your building.
-Bulldoze down their business, bulldoze it down, literally.
-To extend the crack house laws
to include temporary events like raves,
Biden co-sponsors a bill called the RAVE Act.
-Rave stood for
Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy.
It underlines the idea that if you are
in any way connected with this culture,
you are risking arrest.
And it worked. Nobody ever took it again.
Thanks, Joe Biden.
♪
-Biden does finally get a bill passed.
-By that point, it's almost irrelevant anyway,
because all the American rave promoters are scared
to death of putting on a party for fear of getting raided.
-For some, this intense resistance to raves
by those in authority comes as no surprise.
-We're a puritanical country.
We have a lot of maybe shame or guilt
around pleasure or hedonism, you know,
you're supposed to work.
But the raves really celebrated hedonism and pleasure.
That made politicians uncomfortable,
it made parents uncomfortable.
-But as the 2000s continue,
discomfort towards raves starts to soften.
-And it wasn't until, like, the EDM music
came out 2006, 2007
where things started picking up again.
♪
-Rave music comes back into fashion,
now rebranded as EDM -- electronic dance music.
-Suddenly electronic music is huge.
All these festivals spring up.
They just changed the terms and suddenly
it's not a rave anymore, so nobody tries to bust it.
And it becomes big business,
a much bigger business than it ever was in the '90s.
♪
-As for the drug that helped first launch rave culture,
after 36 years as a Schedule One drug,
improved scientific knowledge
allows MDMA to return to its therapeutic roots.
In 2021, the FDA approves a trial to assess MDMAs
promising potential in treating PTSD.
-But it's only when it's combined with therapy.
It's the therapy that is the primary act of treatment.
And the MDMA, the medicine makes the therapy more effective.
-When they go through the protocol,
as many as two thirds or more of people
are getting rid of their symptoms
and don't need to take medication
for post-traumatic stress disorder anymore.
So this is very, very rare in psychiatry.
People don't usually get cured.
-The impressive trial results are submitted to the FDA
for final drug approval in December 2023.
-We finally have the data
that FDA requires to approve MDMA is safe and effective
when it's used in the context of psychotherapy,
and that's really exciting.
-And 35 years after the first UK raves,
the global movement shows no signs of stopping.
-It's so funny to see how many of the older music journalists
that I know who are still just like,
"When is this going to go away?" It's never going to go away.
-I would argue that you still sort of
can feel the messages of peace, love, unity, and respect
at things like Coachella and Burning Man and Bonnaroo,
but I just don't think of them as raves anymore.
-It's actually my definition of purgatory,
being stuck in the mud for three days
with a bunch of frat boys and sorority sisters
high on bad ecstasy.
[ Laughing ] I can't actually think
of a worse experience.
I really --
It really would drive me to murder if I had to do that.
-Critics aside, the desire for raves is stronger than ever.
-Post-pandemic -- the raves are crazy.
-This thing is still growing.
I still think more people are getting involved
in it to this very day. -And the scene now is
much more racially diverse,
more queer, more different styles of music.
-On a pop level, electronic music
is bigger than it's ever been.
We've got to keep doing this.
And you know, it's, like, the world's not going to stop,
but a lot of strife out there.
Let's just dance.
♪