Exposing Manila’s Nightlife: The Real Score on Party Drugs and the People Who Use Them

Editor's Note: This piece is a response to an earlier essay, "The Chemical Romance of Manila’s Professional Class," written by "Molly" and published on Esquire Philippines on April 2.

“It’s not words that fail, it’s the people who wield them. We have no power over life and death, we are subject to pain and disease and misery, but we command words. When you think about it, words are all we really have.” — Jessica Zafra

Molly, I am trying my darndest to understand where you are coming from, especially as I agree that there is a substance use issue among some participants in Manila’s underground nightlife, but I cannot, in good conscience, let some of your words (especially published on Esquire Philippines) go unchallenged.

What you have done in your essay titled “The Chemical Romance of Manila’s Professional Class” does not fully capture the clubbing and raving community, to say the least. I would like to point out that your article reads more like a caricature that dangerously reduces clubbers and ravers into a droning drug-fueled mass who have not much to live for outside of their office cubicles.

Your piece exposes your view of the scene as myopic. This is quite sad, considering that you have portrayed yourself as someone who has spent considerable time with people in this community who have accepted you and shown you compassion.

But then again, I am not surprised. Considering that you admit that you are very much acquainted with “privilege, boredom, and the belief that [your life] could absorb the consequences,” I completely understand why your worldview is quite limited. Fortunately for me and many others who regularly participate in the raves you have misleadingly portrayed to be exclusively driven by illicit substances, this is only your version of the world, and not ours.

As much as drug use and drug trade are open secrets in the dark spaces of nightclubs and raves (this fact has been known for decades), not everyone on the dancefloor uses, buys, or sells drugs. Some are there just to dress up and dance, especially at parties catered towards queer people, where liberation from the strict cisheteronormative rules of conservative society—however temporary—is promised within the confines of the venue. Molly, this is the truth that your essay betrays.

But I do have to agree that in some ways, there is a certain sense of banality surrounding substance use in Manila’s nightlife.

It has become far too common to see small Ziploc bags on the dancefloor, emptied of God-knows-what powder that was in them just a few moments ago. Anyone who has gone to enough parties knows all too well the sly handshakes and hugs between drug dealers and the people who intend to use them for the night.

We are always told at these parties that we should take care of each other, so I take that to heart. I have tended to a handful of ravers who appeared to be out of their wits, stumbling across the venue, and still attempting to dance. I approach them, ask them if they are still okay. Sometimes, they can barely respond. So I take them to a spacious corner, give them water, fan them, and sit with them until they regain some level of consciousness.

As I reflect on your article with more level-headedness, I realize, Molly, that you and I might just be advocating for the same thing: That there is a need for the scene to have a moment of reckoning when it comes to drugs. However, I am still unsure as to how that could come about. Tighter security checks, providing harm reduction information to attendees, and organizers connecting people who are struggling with problematic substance use to drug interventions are some ideas at the top of my head. These are stopgap measures that cater to individual people, but still do not address nightlife’s tendency to include drug use in its DNA.

This is a difficult conversation, but we must seriously talk about it before more people in our community die from substance use. There is no tender way to describe one of the many ways things can go wrong among people who use drugs. Drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova, who struggled with problematic substance use herself, once said that prison or death are the only destinations for people who get hooked on drugs. But her continued success in the entertainment industry and, more importantly, her continuing to be alive to this day, belies her belief and proves that better, healthier outcomes are possible as long as people receive intervention.

Despite what I believe to be our shared agreement on drug use within the nightlife scene, I still have to counter some of your claims in your essay, Molly, particularly those that appear to be advocating for an end to harm reduction strategies among participants in the community that you unfortunately characterized as “patronizing, even dishonest.”

You are correct in describing substance use as dangerous, but allow me to expand further, as it is rather obvious that, despite your admitted use, you do not have a full grasp of how illegal substances can wreak havoc on our organs, especially our very delicate brains. Unfortunately, many people who use drugs also do not know just how damaging illicit substances can be, which is exactly why harm reduction strategies, which include informing people about the risks of drug use, should not be set aside.

Let’s start with the drug that has often been characterized as the “gateway” to trying harder drugs: Marijuana. While attitudes of Filipinos have become more positive towards its use for medical purposes (with a 2023 survey by Capstone-Intel Corporation showing 63 percent support for it), recreational use is still generally frowned upon. And that’s for a good reason: New evidence suggests that chronic marijuana use can cause psychosis, while it has long been established that smoking weed (much like smoking tobacco) can cause lung cancer.

From my conversations with casual users, most are erroneously convinced that marijuana is relatively harmless. Given this belief, combined with the accessibility of the drug and the relative ease of its cultivation in a country with favorable weather and fertile soil like ours, it is no surprise that the latest survey of the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) on substance abuse showed that marijuana is the most used illicit drug in the country.

Shrooms, actual mushrooms that contain the psychoactive chemical psilocybin, are also favored as a “natural” alternative to other synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, PCP, and the horse tranquilizer ketamine. All of these drugs can produce powerful visuals and may even trigger positive spiritual experiences among users, but can also cause nightmarish hallucinations, or in layman’s terms, a “bad trip.” Much like marijuana, these substances are being investigated for their potential applications in medicine, but can also induce psychosis and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, which is basically a trip that can last for weeks, months, or even years.

Cocaine and ecstasy are usually the drugs of choice in the nightlife scene. Both can cause feelings of euphoria—cocaine can boost energy and provide fuel for hours of dancing, while ecstasy (the informal name for the chemical MDMA) can make people who use it much more sociable. Unfortunately, both substances are neurotoxins, which means they can cause brain damage. So much so that people familiar with using ecstasy would advise limiting consumption of the drug to just once every three months.

These are the risks already present when consuming the pure forms of these substances. The problem is that most of the illicit drugs reaching your regular clubber or raver have already been adulterated with other substances as innocuous as baking powder and as insidious as the highly addictive, potent, and potentially deadly fentanyl.

Then there are harder drugs like heroin and meth. These drugs can easily lead people down the path of addiction as they short-circuit the brain’s reward system, making users crave these substances to the point of physical dependency, when they no longer even feel the euphoria, but continue to use them to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay.

This discussion is far from comprehensive, especially if we account for what we usually gloss over: The fact that even legal substances like tobacco and alcohol also carry health risks.

Aside from causing cancer, tobacco contains nicotine, which is also addictive, especially in the form of vapes—which have significantly more of the chemical than traditional cigarettes. Vapes, of course, can cause a unique disease that even has its own name: E-cigarette or Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury (EVALI).

Medical consensus has also changed around alcohol consumption, with doctors no longer telling their patients that it is fine to occasionally consume a glass of wine (supposedly to promote heart health), as new evidence shows that no amount of alcohol is truly safe for consumption, as it metabolizes in the body into carcinogenic compounds.

There is a long-held belief among people familiar with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals: That the substance in and of itself is not what makes it poisonous, but the dosage. Even water consumed in excessive amounts in a short period of time can knock people unconscious and make their brains swell, sending them to the emergency room.

So when the people in the community who accepted you, Molly, advised each other on pacing and safer use, this is what they had in mind.

Harm reduction strategies were never about promoting drug use. In fact, if you familiarize yourself with this philosophy, you would easily understand that among the methods its advocates employ is discouraging drug use at the very start. Unfortunately, limited curiosity (perhaps curtailed by decades of anti-drug propaganda that favored heavy-handed law enforcement strategies) has prevented you, and a lot of other people, from seeing this.

Harm reduction recognizes that people have agency over their bodies, that ultimately it is their choice whether or not to use substances. Yes, we would prefer if they do not use at all, given the harms associated with these drugs, but if they do decide to use, we want them to be informed of the risks and mitigate these so that they do not end up in a hospital, or worse, the morgue.

So Molly, being told to pace yourself and reminded of safer use, even in passing and even if it feels repetitive, is an effective guardrail against falling off the edge and into the grave.

Beyond public health and law enforcement, another critical component when talking about substance use is the perceived morality (or immorality) of people who use drugs. Drug use in the Philippines has long been associated with criminality, with Filipinos believing that people who use drugs are violent and are more likely to commit atrocities like rape and murder. This is the same rhetoric on which Rodrigo Duterte built his campaign for the presidency that ultimately led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent Filipinos on the mere perception that they are terrible people (even sub-human) because they use drugs.

A big part of the propaganda machine of this enduring narrative is the media. On primetime newscasts, the first 15 minutes are typically allotted to coverage of crimes, even if there were bigger national news that broke on the same day. The reason is simple: These news items earn and sustain attention, which directly lines the pockets of corporate media, all while fuelling a skewed perception of the country as descending into lawlessness due to drugs and is in need of an iron fist to discipline the populace.

The truth, however, is less gloomy. The country’s crime rate, as reported by the Philippine National Police, has decreased by 7.2 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. The DDB also recorded a decline in drug prevalence to 1.71 percent in 2023 from 2.05 percent, which it said represented over 196,000 fewer people who use drugs.

Your essay, Molly—though a blip in the larger media ecosystem—echoes this dangerous discourse that has killed thousands. Your insinuations that raves are hotbeds of illegal drugs, that harm reduction encourages and normalizes drug use and should be disposed of, and that drug use is immoral, contribute to the Mean World Syndrome that many Filipinos are afflicted with, which has influenced them to vote for tyrannical leaders bent on killing helpless and impoverished Filipinos all while siphoning public funds into their personal bank accounts and depriving all of us, especially the most needy, the services that we deserve as taxpaying citizens.

Among those services are effective demand reduction strategies and robust social support systems to dissuade people from ever using drugs, improvements in our public health system and adequate funding to fully realize universal healthcare, and investments in drug rehabilitation facilities and other psychosocial interventions to help reintegrate people suffering from problematic substance use into society.

This is the big picture, Molly. But what worries me more is that your words could also endanger the same people who “[held you] through sudden sadness, [spoke] to [you] with softness that ordinary life rarely permits, [and accepted] whatever [you] confessed without recoil, correction, or intrusive curiosity” to a very real risk of them landing in jail at best and getting murdered at worst. What you have done, intentionally or not, is to put targets on their backs much like how mouthpieces of the state accused activists and other members of civil society of being members of the armed Communist rebellion — a practice that has been widely condemned and is popularly known as red-tagging.

If there is one thing I absolutely agree with in your essay, it is your assessment of the shallowness of your motive to try illicit drugs in the first place: “Boredom, vanity, and the desire for novelty” outside of your nine-to-five. It is also quite fascinating to me that this same boredom that you said pushed you into drug use is also the same boredom that convinced you to dissociate from the nightlife scene and throw them under the bus.

It is difficult, if not completely impossible, to describe the average clubber or raver. We cannot ascribe descriptors to people who participate in nightlife, as the community is composed of individuals with different motives as to why they are on the dancefloor in the first place. A common characterization, however, of the nightlife participant is one who is lost, seeking to fill in gaps in their life that they can never seem to satisfy. I would have to admit that some of the people I have met in the scene fit this profile, but to even suggest that many of the individuals in clubs and raves are also like this is wrong.

Like you said, these people are just like you and me. They are part of the workforce that keeps Corporate Manila running—executives, lawyers, HR professionals, accountants, and other occupants of office cubicles in air-conditioned buildings. Some of them are doctors, engineers, and even bureaucrats. As much as we would want to deny it, this simple truth persists: We are all there to escape.

I once read a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that they were told by their therapist during a session that perhaps they do not need psychosocial intervention and instead need a labor union at their workplace. A lot can be said (and has been said) about our collective jadedness brought by late capitalism, especially in our time, when Big Tech has gone beyond dictating the content we see on our screens, as it is now actively steering government policies. The increasing inauthenticity of our social feeds has us craving for real human interactions and for “third spaces” in between home and work where these can take place.

Nightclubs and raves provide that third space, no matter how liminal. They give people a reprieve from the suffocating busyness of being a cog in the capitalist machine. Beyond just ending boredom, these events allow us to reclaim something fundamental that work under our current social, political, and economic system has robbed us of— our humanity.

The writer Jessica Zafra once said that words are all we have as frail humans. Tender words of care wielded in practicing harm reduction by the same people you have unnecessarily villainized, saved, and continue to save many human lives. Our words are defenses not only against bodily harm but also harms that could be inflicted by the state and its goons.

Our words, Molly, are potent. It can draw people out of the dark. It can also cause irreparable damage. If harm is ever inflicted upon any person in our community because of your essay, I hope you are not driven to sleepless nights, the kind similarly induced by days-long benders but stripped of any euphoria as you grapple with your guilt.

I have witnessed the rise of Duterte's regime, which all of us aided and abetted, whether we were aware of it or not. Our words—in private conversations, on Facebook posts, in the printed word, on primetime newscasts—legitimized and enabled him. We are all culpable. If we have any sense of remorse for the thousands slain during the war on drugs, we should attempt to do penance by being more mindful about the words we use, especially those that would be seen by a wide audience.

That is why it is extremely important that we continue this conversation on drugs and drug use in Manila’s nightlife. But discussions must use careful and caring language to encourage people struggling with problematic substance use not to be intimidated to ask for help, collectively think of and implement drug interventions in our community, and convince more people to look at our drug problem as something that should be addressed by effective public health initiatives and not iron-fisted law enforcement strategies.

Because unlike people occupying positions of power, we are not equipped with arms. Words are all we have.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use, help is available. Reach out to the Substance Abuse Helpline at 1550 to speak with someone who can guide you toward support, treatment options, and recovery.

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