Controversy surrounding drug use in the dance music scene is always a present issue. Whether it be to educate dance fans on drug safety or bad press purposely shedding negative light on the community for selfish purpose, the issue will always be present.
A new study hosted at Ultra Music Festival by the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education pooled 145 young participants to find out more about drug use in the scene. 72% of participants admitted to having used either marijuana, cocaine, molly, or ecstasy during the weekend of Ultra. More often than not, bath salts are passed off and sold as ‘molly' to naive festival attendees. Out of 104 urine samples taken from the study, more than 80% tested positive for molly or ‘gravel', a synthetic bath salt, in their systems.
The Center for Forensic Science Research & Education assures the community the study was only done to better understand ‘some of the newly emerging and potentially dangerous new drugs popular in the community'. The synthetic bath salt gravel was responsible for a 21 year old's death at Ultra 2014.
The results of the study were sent to the mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, by the director of the Center, Barry Logan. The mayor was even further displeased about the results of the study, since he hopes to do away with Ultra after the incident in 2014 involving a security guard who was trampled to death.
Although the study may shed some light on drug education in the dance community, the pool of participants was ‘less than one tenth of a percent of the tickets sold for the festival', making it an unreliable study to say the least.
