At the Estéreo Picnic Festival, which will take place from 25 to 27 March in the vicinity of the Colombian capital, there will be a recovery zone for those who suffer a bad trip due to drug use. They will be attended by the staff specialized in psychoactive first aid of the Échele Cabeza program.
The initiative is part of the Drugs, Festivals and Crisis Care Service of Échele Cabeza, one of the projects of the corporation Acción Técnica Social, which is committed to generating and disseminating information on psychoactive substances for the reduction of risks and harm to those who consume them. In the words of its director, Julián Quintero, in the face of the impossibility of winning the war on drugs, we must find a way to live with them.
The service, which was to be inaugurated as part of the Jamming Festival, will take effect during the Estéreo Picnic Festival, and psychologist Daniel Rojas Estupiñán, a member of the Social Technical Action team, explained to Infobae Colombia what it consists of.
(Note: Although the EFF in its advertisements is emphatic on drug prohibition, as in any event of this caliber it is difficult to control whether attendees enter them, hence the Social Technical Action prevention initiative).
The idea of providing psychoactive first aid arose from the inexperience of logistics and health personnel at events such as music festivals in dealing with people in crisis due to substance use, because, contrary to providing them with help, they can exacerbate their bad trip.
“The approach is not the most appropriate approach and, on the contrary, it intensifies the crisis. And in itself a bad trip is a psychological crisis of high malaise. We have noticed that in the attention of these cases there is a lack of empathy, perhaps because of ignorance: sometimes, the way people talk and approach people is not the best,” Rojas explained.
It was in this context that, jointly between Social Technical Action and the Ministry of Health of Ibagué, health personnel who were going to be at the Jamming Festival were trained to attend to those who presented a bad trip. They were explained what a crisis consists of, as well as how to address it with empathy and from human rights.
Although no such training took place at the Estéreo Picnic, the members of Échele Cabeza will be working with the festival's health services to identify any emergency case.
Regarding the substances that are most commonly used in this type of festival, Rojas commented that although it is relative, the ones that have been most often identified are:
It is worth remembering that on the page echelecabeza.com, Social Technical Action has the information on each substance, the affects and duration, with the aim, among others, of generating self-care practices towards non-problematic users of SPA.
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