Hangover before the party

Parties drew thousands to Kenting last April, but for some the scene turned sour. A South African English teacher living in Kaohsiung drowned at a rave on Dawan (大灣) beach after using drugs or alcohol, and police rounded up 110 suspected ecstasy users at a second rave and tested them for drugs.

Media coverage hit scandalous proportions, with one headline reading "Thousand-person sex and drugs party." This year, a somewhat embarrassed Hengchun police force will step up enforcement, with drugs as a top priority.

Kenting's station chief, Huang Chao-ying (黃昭穎), told the Taipei Times police are prepared to take "additional measures" against drugs.

The area's ranking officer, Hengchun police precinct chief Kuo Chih-yu (郭志裕), reiterated the message: "We welcome young people coming to these activities in Kenting, but we want to warn them we will be looking for drugs," he said.

"We're not targeting any event specifically, but we have noticed that activities continuing late into the night or until dawn are more likely to have people using illegal substances," he added.

Kenting has hosted concerts and other music-related events during the first weekend of April every year since 1995. Last year saw the biggest attendance ever, but also logged the first death and first drug raid.

This year, organizers of events including Spring Scream and the Moonlight Make a Wish party, will erect large signs warning against drug use on their sites.

But Kuo says, "The organizers can't stop people from bringing drugs in. So we can't say that one party will have drugs and one won't. In fact, more or less all of them do."

For last April's Kenting raid, Kuo's Hengchun precinct needed to enlist the aid of officers from several other Pingtung County precincts, amassing a force of 250 that closed in on a rave put on by the Taipei-based group Dreamfield (夢田) at around 3am on the weekend's Saturday morning.

"They picked out anyone they'd seen doing drugs or anyone who looked like they were on drugs, and took them all to the station," said A-Chi (not his real name), a 24-year-old man who was detained.

Police had previously infiltrated the event with plain clothes officers who helped identify users among the crowd of over 500 when uniformed police moved in. Of the 110 suspects brought in, only about one-third were in possession of drugs. According to Kenting police, more than 100 of them went on to test positive for ecstasy.

Drug use is a felony in Taiwan, but first-time users are generally given a mandatory maximum 30 day stay in detoxification facilities in lieu of prosecution.

Evidence of drug use is usually established through compulsory urine tests, a practice some lawyers consider to be in a gray area of civil rights, though it has not been challenged since becoming widespread last year. At the Hengchun police precinct, A-Chi said that some people tried to resist being tested, "but they still had to."

"They just tell you, if you don't do it, then you're staying [at the station]. After you go to the bathroom, you can leave. If you're not willing to give a urine sample, then they'll say, `OK, we'll just take a hair sample," A-Chi said.

A-Chi was in the station for about 10 hours before he produced a urine sample and was allowed to leave. The test eventually came back positive, but it was not until last fall that he was required to report for 20 days of compulsory detoxification, a prison stay he merely described as "very boring."