Spain’s Medusa Sunbeach Pageant has launched an on-site location the place attendees can take a look at if their drink has been spiked.
The six-day home, techno, and exhausting dance occasion, which returned to Valencia’s Playa Cullera from August 7-12, featured a devoted tent with take a look at kits that may detect GHB, a colorless and odorless psychoactive substance that has gained notoriety as a “date-rape” drug within the nation lately, Reuters stories.
The so-called “violet level” marks the primary hurt discount service of its sort at a Spanish competition. Samples are taken from attendees’ drinks with droppers and positioned in a take a look at tube with a chemical reagent. Samples containing GHB flip shiny crimson, and competition protocol mandates that emergency providers and legislation enforcement be contacted within the case of a optimistic take a look at.
The tent was additionally staffed with social employees to reply to attainable circumstances of gender-based violence or sexual abuse, together with the Valencia girls’s community’s Rosana Galvez, who advised Reuters the checks have been a strategy to forestall sexual assaults.
Different violet factors are popping up at live shows, festivals, and different public gatherings in Spain as a part of an initiative from the Spanish Equality Ministry to help victims and witnesses of sexual harassment and gender-based violence. They derive their title from the colour purple’s affiliation with the worldwide feminist and gender-based equality motion.
Elsewhere world wide, a brand new legislation requiring bars and nightclubs to supply patrons “take a look at strips, stickers, straws and different units designed to detect the presence of managed substances in a drink” took impact in California final month.
Drink spiking was additionally made a particular felony offense within the UK final month. Although drink spiking was already against the law within the nation, the brand new laws goals to “strengthen the legislation to enhance the police response to spiking,” in line with an official briefing from the King’s Speech.
The tenth version of Medusa Sunbeach Pageant featured headliners comparable to Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, Amelie Lens, and extra, who carried out for a crowd of 56,000 folks.
Featured picture from Medusa Sunbeach Pageant.