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One thing I've learned from a deep and long festival phase in my 30s was that there's a kind of underbelly to the sexual consent education and enlightened psychedelic crisis assistance. Festivals, you see, hate emergency/police attention. Many festivals are barely tolerated by their communities and every drug overdose death or reported rape reduces their chances of happening again. Especially if your festival is at all counter-cultureish, like embraces nudity or polyamory or drug use.
On the tin, consent education and psychedelic awareness are good!
It's good to teach people that "no" means "no", and that an absence of clear "fuck yes!" is more safely interpreted as "no" (dubbed "enthusiastic affirmative consent").
It's good to have medics that know how to treat people undergoing a psychedelic crisis by talking them through it, or giving them valium rather than sending them to an ER where they'll be strapped to their hospital bed and spend hours being terrified while square doctors treat them like they're having a toxicology emergency.
The flip side of consent education is the diffusion of responsibility. To some degree they try to teach women that they share responsibility for unwanted sexual encounters, and festival services people do try to change date rape from black/white to a continuum where it's considered a learning experience and the women are encouraged to learn and grow rather than call the police. The end result is some women feel social pressure not to report sex crimes against them. Quite a lot more than you'd expect from such a self-proclaimed feminist environment.
The situation with psychedelic aware counselling is mixed. Although it's good to not medicalize someone having a rough LSD trip, the festivals can go the other way towards encouraging psychedelic use, and treating it like a form of wimpiness if you can't handle your LSD. You probably have some undiagnosed psychological hangup if you're so scared of tripping, right? You're not trying to avoid doing the work, are you? Oh, you're wasting your DMT vape pen if you're not breaking through to the machine elf dimension so make sure to get a good proper hit. It's true fewer people end up being sent to the hospital for psychedelic crisis, but I do wonder how many more people are one shotted into burning their professional and personal lives down because they got pushed into experiencing the interconnectedness of all things a bit too vividly.
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