It’s Labor Day 2018 on Randalls Island, and a swarm of young Americans—a giggling day-glo batallion in unicorn horns and angel wings—tumble from the school bus that brought them here from Brooklyn.
The Electric Zoo EDM festival is celebrating its tenth anniversary and the excitement is building, flickering from the synapses to the stomach like the promise of sex, drugs or danger. Anticipation tinged with fantasy: the purest of pleasures, uncut by reality.
"They’re goddamn half-naked,” says Gee, our 60-year-old bus driver, eyes popping. “They’re all on drugs—they hide it in their bra, if they got one!”
Across a sweeping meadow, the gig is in full flow: Young women in thongs twerk on a telco-sponsored balcony; buff guys with fake tans writhe like gibbons craving orgasm. A vast video screen blazes an animation of Elon Musk vomiting a million fractal screaming Elon Musks. The music crests and dips, an exploding juggernaut on a rollercoaster. The snares hit octuple time, then there’s a pause before the bass drops like falling masonry in your face.
I’m here to investigate a cultural shift that is underway as more young Americans enter the dance-drug culture. MDMA, which, by some harm reductionists’ estimates, is used by about 80 percent of attendees at festivals like this one, has gone primetime. Its availability and potency skyrocketed after wholesale prices plunged in the last few years in the EU, where a huge percentage of the world’s supply is made. I’m determined to trace the path of the pills or powders used in the US upstream—to the darknet dealers that are mailing drugs to potentially thousands of US homes, to the Dutch mega-labs where MDMA is made and back to the source: China, which is exporting boatloads of legally dubious precursor chemicals. Mostly, I want to figure out what exactly users can do to stay safer while the market remains unregulated.
