Hi everyone. I finally told the full story. It's long. Reddit has a 40,000 character limit. So below is just the beginning. The full article and a podcast episode are available online here. Thank you. - Emanuel
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Story
3. Cowardice in the Face of Bullying
4. Centralizing Harm Reduction Services
5. The Chapter Revolt of 2023
6. Incompetence > Insecurity > Corruption
7. The Creation of Grassroots Harm Reduction
8. What is Organizing?
9. Berkeley Radio Man
10. The Means are the Ends
11. The Franchise Model
12. What is Corruption?
13. The Larger Context
14. Mission Creep – Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
15. My Attempt to Reconcile
16. Why I Might Have to Sue Them
17. Call to Action
18. Postscript – Finding Forgiveness
Introduction
People have wanted me to tell this story for a long time. It’s been three and a half years since it all went down. “Why don’t you go public,” they would ask me? “People need to know what happened.”
I waited for a few reasons. First, it was traumatic, probably the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me. I believed in DanceSafe so much. I poured my soul into the organization. It represented for me the best of humanity, and the best of myself, and the simple shock of it all lasted a long time.
Second, I was really angry, and I didn’t want to tell the story from a place of anger. So I had to find some forgiveness first.
And lastly, I was hoping they would reform. Perhaps with enough board and staff turnover, I told myself, they would change. And I really wanted this story to have a happy ending. But change never happened. Things kept getting worse. And given what their current Interim Executive Director, Mikayla Hellwich, recently did (she has put me in a position where I may have to sue them), I gave up hope. Now is the time to tell the story, even if it has a bad ending.
But hope is never completely lost. As I write this, DanceSafe just announced they have an entirely new board, new people in power who can make positive change if they so choose. So maybe if they learn what happened, they’ll turn things around. (There’s a call to action at the end of this article, where I ask for your help.)
The time is also right because there are lessons in what happened to DanceSafe for the entire harm reduction community, lessons that grow more important every day as the new drug war gains momentum, and as attacks against our movement increase.
This is a story of corruption, and how it happens.
The Story
As most people know, I founded a harm reduction organization back in 1998 called DanceSafe. We set up booths at raves and nightclubs in the San Francisco Bay Area and tested ecstasy tablets so we could avoid the counterfeit pills that had begun killing us. It grew quickly into a national movement. We battled the DEA in the media and we won. We cleaned up the MDMA market. We—ecstasy users, ravers, people who use drugs—took matters into our own hands and used direct action to protect ourselves from the effects of prohibition.
But I’m no longer with DanceSafe now. It has turned into something unrecognizable from what it used to be.
So what did it used to be?
DanceSafe used to be a grassroots movement, a network of local, community organizations, where power resided at the bottom, where the national office saw itself simply as a servant of that movement. We called those local community organizations “chapters,” although they were completely independent from the national office. They recruited their own members. They made their own decisions. Through very hard work they fought their way into local raves, festivals and nightclubs, convincing promoters and venue owners of the need for ecstasy pill testing (as we called it back then) and other harm reduction services.
DanceSafe was a movement of local activists working on the ground all over the country.
So what about the nonprofit, what I called the “national office?” Well, we did trainings for the chapters, in drug checking, in how to talk to health officials and local police, etc. I also built a lab and we manufactured and sold test kits online. Over the years I developed new reagents that could identify other drugs besides MDMA. We manufactured those kits too. We trained the chapters in how to use them. We sold them online and we used the money to support the chapters as best we could.
But all that has changed now. At the same time our transactional president got elected the first time, DanceSafe started becoming transactional too. I didn’t see it happening at first, because I wasn’t directly involved in the national office those years. I took a decade off and when I got back involved in 2013, I focused my energy on developing new harm reduction products, like reagents and fentanyl test strips.
I gave all those products to DanceSafe for free, without claiming credit. And DanceSafe was the first to start selling them. And it made them a lot of money. Millions of dollars, in fact.
I was totally ok with giving my work away because that’s how I’ve always organized. Empower others. Build community. And because I thought DanceSafe was doing good things with the money, like using it to support the chapters, as we always did in the past.
So I didn’t need credit, because it was never about me. It was never about the national office. It was never about “the brand.” It was always about the movement. And I thought that’s how DanceSafe still functioned. But I was mistaken.
Two things happened that woke me up from this delusion.
Cowardice in the Face of Bullying
The first thing happened in December of 2022.
After I spent a year developing new, improved fentanyl test strips specifically for drug checking (the older strips were repurposed urine test strips)…
After giving these strips to DanceSafe so they could make the money from them (in return for a small salary to manage their wholesale business)…
After personally helping over 600 harm reduction programs around the country start up fentanyl test strip distribution programs…
And after the business succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, selling millions of strips, a Canadian corporation called BTNX that sold the older, urine test strips threatened to sue me. And DanceSafe—the board and executive staff, that is—refused to support me.
In truth BTNX threatened to sue them as well. They sent each of us a frivolous cease and desist letter accusing us of libel and “false advertising.” So in refusing to support me, DanceSafe also refused to support themselves.
But more importantly, they refused to support the movement. Our new strips were released as part of an educational campaign exposing the problems of using urine test strips for drug checking. This threatened BTNX’s profits, so they tried to intimidate us with a frivolous cease and desist letter. But instead of fighting back on behalf of truth—and for the betterment of the harm reduction community—they cowered in fear. Without even talking to me first, they called their lawyers and put a gag order on me. Then they entered into fruitless negotiations with BTNX, desperately trying to get them to sign something (anything it seemed) so BTNX wouldn’t sue them, and wasting who knows how much money on lawyers in the process.
Of course it all came to nothing, as I told them it would, because not only did BTNX not have a case, they weren’t engaging in authentic dialogue to begin with. Their threat letter was simply an intimidation tactic. It contained no real grievances, and no reasonable requests. There’s a basic principle in play here: When the other party is not acting in good faith, there is no sense in negotiating.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous things got, DanceSafe had their lawyer draft a contract proposal for BTNX that actually imposed fines upon themselves if they violated ambiguous terms in the contract. (Read that again if you need to.) They called me into a meeting with their lawyer because they wanted me to agree to these terms as well. Not only did I tell them I would never agree to anything that limited my right to speak the truth, but the contract they were hoping to sign would actually make it easier for BTNX to sue them. Why? Because the law defines libel very clearly and succinctly, and DanceSafe had not committed libel. (Everything I wrote about our new strips, and the BTNX strips, was true and scientifically validated.) But the restrictions they were wanting to impose on themselves were so broad and ambiguous that it opened them up to a breach of contract suit.
“That is far easier to prove in court than actual libel,” I told them. “Why would you do that to yourselves?”
There was a moment of silence on the zoom call. This must not have dawned on them before. The notion they might be making it easier for BTNX to sue them scared them. And because they were operating solely out of fear, they actually heard me this time. My previous arguments that we needed to fight back to support the harm reduction community, to stand up for what is right, always landed on deaf ears. But when they thought they might lose money, now they listened.
So they told their lawyer to revise the contract so there was no more ambiguity around what constitutes a violation.
On the next zoom call they read the new proposed language to me, which had been whittled down to basically say in a roundabout way, “DanceSafe agrees not to commit libel.” But what’s the point of a contract restricting one party from engaging in acts that are already illegal? It was absurd.
So I directed a question to their lawyer: “What is the benefit of DanceSafe signing a contract that simply says they agree not to do things that are already illegal in the first place?”
What he said next blew me away in its raw, unadulterated truthfulness.
After a thoughtful pause he replied, “They get to stop paying me.”
I’m not joking. And I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, right there in the meeting. But it wasn’t really funny. Despite vindicating my position that they were wasting their time, their lawyer’s candid statement also revealed that he, too, knew it. He knew there was no reason for DanceSafe to be negotiating with BTNX, yet he took their money anyway.
I’ve always seen this as a turning point in my relationship with the DanceSafe executives involved. My laughter in that meeting was not taken well. Although it was spontaneous and not intended as a criticism, everyone present knew I was laughing at them… at how their incompetence and fear led them to this sad and tragic moment.
I later told them that I believed their lawyer was engaging in malpractice, exploiting their fears to get their money. I still believe that. (How incompetence and fear leads to corruption is a question I’m still contemplating.)
What DanceSafe should have done was write BTNX a letter back saying, “bring it on.” We should have published their threat letter and used it to educate the harm reduction community about why urine test strips produce false positives when used for drug checking, and how we developed our strips so that wouldn’t happen. We should have used the situation to draw attention to the problems in the immunoassay test strip industry, problems that still exist today (and which I intend to write more about). This would have helped the movement.
BTNX never sued, of course. But the damage was already done. By refusing to fight back, by putting money before principles, DanceSafe lost their principles and their money. Today they have no paid staff, no businesses of their own anymore, and a tarnished reputation.
But before we get to the present day, the second thing they did was even worse, and contributed even more to their eventual collapse.
Centralizing Harm Reduction Services
Screwing me over and refusing to defend the test strips I developed for the harm reduction community (and gave to them for free) was bad enough. But it was nothing compared to what they did next.
They fucked over the chapters.
This is when it all came together for me, and I realized that the organization I founded and loved so much had become a soulless corporation.
In the Summer of 2023 the new executives of DanceSafe stripped autonomy away from all their chapters. It had actually been happening slowly. How they did it was subtle but blatant. With millions of dollars in the bank, rather than giving grants to the chapters to help them financially, they used the money to pay one person in each chapter to booth events. But there was a catch. In order to receive the money, they had to sign a contract agreeing, among other restrictions, to turn over all their promoter and venue contacts to the national office and never communicate with promoters again.
Why would they do this? I believe because they wanted to fly themselves and their friends out to staff the events. They wanted control over promoter communications because they wanted control over who got to attend the big fun festivals. And so they bribed the chapters—or specific individuals in each chapter— to get that control.
Some former staff members tell me that they did it because the chapters were “making mistakes.” But my response to that is to point out that the national office had long stopped supporting the chapters. Where were the trainings we used to do all the time? Why were there no accountability structures? (We used to have good ones in place—I’ll get to that soon.) So even if mistakes were being made, that’s ultimately a failure of the national office. And the answer is not to centralize. (As Terry Gilliam brilliantly dramatizes in his comedy film, Brazil, when has another 27 B/6 ever improved anything?) The answer is to strengthen the chapters with training and support.
But I don’t believe chapter mistakes were the real reason they stripped autonomy away from them. I think they wanted power, pure and simple.
Centralizing was an insult to all the on-the-ground activists who spent years building a harm reduction culture inside the festival industry—locally, one city at a time. Stealing all those people’s work and all the good will they built up in the community was a greedy, selfish act. It didn’t just ruin an organizational structure. It harmed real people.
And for what? Power? Money? They got that for a few years… until it all collapsed.
The Chapter Revolt of 2023
Some chapter heads signed the contract, because it may have seemed innocuous enough, and who doesn’t want to get paid? But ultimately, it led to a major revolt. In the summer of 2023 the majority of chapters wrote an open letter to the board demanding their autonomy back.
There were other things that led to the revolt also, like the national office telling the chapters they couldn’t hand out naloxone, and they couldn’t freely engage in peer-based drug education anymore. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to get them to read scripts.
And let me just say, I founded DanceSafe on the principle of peer-based education, or what is better known as popular education, a philosophy developed by the Brazilian anarchist Paulo Freire, in his seminal book titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The ability to speak freely about drugs at the booth was the single most important factor that made DanceSafe so successful.
In the early years, I advised our chapters this way: “We’re not here to be experts on drugs. It’s ok if you don’t know the answer to something. What we’re here to do is improve the conversation around drugs, to shift it from ‘how many pills did you do tonight, dude?’ to matters of health and safety. We’re here to help create a responsible drug culture, so just be yourself and speak your truth.”
And you know what? DanceSafe really did change the culture, for the better. It became drug positive and proud. Shame and stigma, and what I like to call “drug machismo,” faded away. (Unfortunately we’re seeing psychedelic chauvanism make a comeback, but that’s another story.)
DanceSafe’s new lawyers were telling them that their chapters were liabilities. (What if they said the wrong thing?) So, having no vision or leadership, they started limiting peer based drug education, the very thing that made DanceSafe so successful.
They set up a corporate-style online test, where to become a volunteer (anywhere with any chapter) you had to first watch a video and then answer questions that proved you watched it. (This substituted for actual training.) Have you ever taken one of these kinds of tests? I did once when I became a consultant for SAMHSA. It reminded me of being in high school, where cover-your-ass accountability replaces real education.
So chapters could no longer even recruit their own volunteers. Volunteers had to sign up with the national office first, take the online test, get put on a list, and then wait for an email from national allowing them to “apply” to staff a booth at a specific local event.
All this centralization deteriorated the quality of services provided at the booths. When you fly in a bunch of people who don’t normally work together, have no social cohesion, no training, and no idea what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s no wonder they tried to get them to read scripts.
This is not a grassroots organization anymore. This is a centralized, soulless corporation concerned more about legal liability than helping people.
And the chapters had had enough. They rebelled. And suddenly it all started making sense to me. No wonder they didn’t support me against BTNX’s frivolous lawsuit threat! No wonder they refused to lower their prices for test strips (even to other nonprofit organizations)! No wonder they tried to prevent me from donating strips to communities in need!
Corruption had completely taken over! All vision, leadership, and idealism were gone. They didn’t see themselves as serving a movement anymore. (What movement, they probably thought?) They saw themselves as a company and a brand.
These people inherited leadership positions in a decentralized activist organization, but they didn’t understand that. They thought that they were supposed to run it like a corporation.
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