Glastonbury, the Isle of Wight festival, Bestival and other major summer music festivals are to black out their websites to highlight the dangers of “legal highs”.
The 24-hour online blackout campaign on Monday will see organisers replacing their online presence with an image of a roulette wheel and the message: “You could lose the lot on legal highs.”
More than 40 summer festivals, including T in the Park, the Secret Garden party, Lovebox and Parklife, are to take part in the initiative organised by the Association of Independent Festivals. That is double the number who took part in a similar campaign last year.
The homepage of each website will lead to an infographic showing key statistics, facts and advice about legal highs. It will include information and advice about nitrous oxide or “laughing gas”, whose widespread use has triggered serious health fears. Fields strewn with the metal canisters that are used to inhale the gas have become a familiar sight at many festivals.
Glastonbury organisers said earlier this week that they were banning nitrous oxide from their site this year, saying they wanted to reclaim one part – King’s Meadow – as a sacred space.
“Sadly the King’s Meadow has lost its way. It’s become known as a place where people take nitrous oxide, a damaging drug which pollutes our beautiful field with noise, litter and N2O gas [a greenhouse gas which is 298 times more polluting than carbon dioxide],” said Liz Eliot, of Glastonbury’s Green Fields.
“Nitrous oxide is also dangerous: an exploding canister was the source of a major injury at last year’s Glastonbury,” she said, adding that two tonnes of canisters had been picked up by hand after last year’s festival.
The festivals’ websites will highlight the unpredictable effects of many legal highs and emphasise that the risks can be even greater than traditional illegal drugs as far less is known about them.
The number of legal highs on the market is rising exponentially each year, with the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction recording 101 new substances last year. Many are synthesised by chemists in south-east Asia, with effects designed to imitate more traditional drugs such as ecstasy, cannabis and amphetamines.
Paul Reed, of the Association of Independent Festivals, said the dangers of legal highs were of great concern to anyone involved in staging music festivals: “We want all events this summer to be safe, enjoyable environments for music fans. This is an important message and we are pleased to say that this initiative is growing, with over 40 festivals participating this year.”
The initiative also follows a letter from the Home Office crime prevention minister, Lynne Featherstone, asking summer festival organisers to introduce “no legal high” policies, including nitrous oxide, as a condition of entry to the festival site. They have also been asked to provide onsite drug treatment and information services.
The Home Office says the recreational use of nitrous oxide appears to be tolerated and increasingly used at festivals despite recent official advice highlighting the harm it can cause.
