Author: jamiebeano

• Drugs are a deep part of festival music culture and police are unable to stop this.
• There are a wide range of drugs being consumed in festivals and reports have proven that this is on the rise
• There are many risks with doing “festival drugs” inside of a festival due to the nature of the long running, high activity festivals.
• Prohibited drugs in festivals also have a higher chance of being adulterated and even containing Fentanyl
• There is a great risk of heart related illness in the hot temperatures of festivals that drugs on increase.
• Entrance searches are a typical procedure in festivals that outline what drugs are not allowed.
• The government has also taking actions against drug use in modern festival site with bills that could allow them to heavily fine festival owners.
• these anti drug campaigns have not been a wide success. Festivals should look instead to harm reduction
• No matter what festival attendees will make an effort to use illicit drugs.
• Harm reduction is an umbrella term used for strategies to reduce the risk of drug abuse in festivals such as information and “chill out tents”
• This is an argumentative paper for the implementation of harm reduction methods in music festivals

Jamie O’Neill

In 2018, I decided to take a year away from school, there was one place I was lucky enough to be able to go to purely because of curiosity, Malaysia. I signed up for a gap year program that would include living in Malaysian Borneo to volunteer with time to explore the unique area. Looking back, I know now it was the same voice that told me to convince my friends from home to visit the hole-in-the-wall Somalian restaurant instead of our normal take out place. If I am choosing a restaurant, I like to choose one that has a culture that I have never tried before. This appears to be a meaningless trait for everyday life, but I think of it as a way that I choose to live. 

Most of our meals came from the cooks who served us traditional Malaysian food at our camp which was great but  many of my friends at the camp were not accustomed to eating rice every day, so when they had the opportunity to eat at a western-style fast food restaurant the group was ecstatic. At our first opportunity to eat a Malaysian restaurant, we chose to eat at the Colonel’s own Kentucky Fried Chicken house. I still had reason to be excited, Malaysian KFC was different. I had the opportunity to try the Malay truffle parmesan fried chicken overlooking a jungle.. 

I could not lie to myself the chicken was disappointing. I should have seen that putting a dry layer of parmesan and truffle oil on fried chicken would not be the satisfying cultural experience I had hoped it would be.

As my time in Malaysia was near its end, we had one more opportunity to go to an outside restaurant and I knew I needed to get unique Malaysian food in a restaurant before I left. My companions were satisfied with the Malaysian KFC and opted to go there but I had to stand up. I asked our Malay program leader if there were any other places he would recommend and he told me about Indian restaurants that served food like “roti canai” which is a doughy flatbread that is inspired by both Malaysia and India..

When we got off our bus we flew past the KFC in search for our Pan-Asian flatbread. The area was crowded and full of cash and fabric stores we asked around but even though the area had many English speakers we did not know how to describe what we were looking for. We were about to give up and take a three-piece of shame before we found it. On the side of the road were Arabic lettering giving showing us that we had found our El Malay-Indian Dorado. 

I wish I could tell you the food was where it all paid off but I had to wait. I was given a meal with beef that was cold because it had clearly been sitting outside the entire day. This was served on top of an undercooked egg and the flatbread. I stopped eating when my friend found a large bug in his food after he had eaten most of it. I felt incredibly sorry I had roped my friends into this but that didn’t matter. When I looked around, I found my friends laughing and talking about everything they saw when we were finding this place.. 

Two days later it was my time to leave but only half of my friends were there to wish me goodbye. The rest were in the hospital for food poisoning on an IV drip and those that ate KFC and were still at the hostel had serious diarrhea. None of the people who ate roti canai with me were sick. As I took my 23-hour journey back to LaGuardia Airport I thought about how lucky I was by sticking with my instinct to explore new things by traveling to beautiful Malaysia and trying a shitty Malay-Indian restaurant on the side of the road.

Hello everyone, my name is Jamie O’Neill. I am from just north of Wilmington Delaware in a town called Arden. I am excited to get started here at the University of Delaware, but I originally started school at the Miami University of Ohio. After my first year there I took a gap year where I was able to work and live in Costa Rica, Chile, Malaysia and Ireland. Coming back from gaining experiences and seeing my foreign family I am looking forward to being in college as much as I was when I originally left high school. I am planning on being a Management Information System Major, but we will see where my path leads to. I love playing and following all different sports including football, basketball, soccer, baseball, MMA, chess and poker basically everything but hockey It is hard for me to describe myself but hopefully my fellow classmates will get to know me this semester.