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Exclusive Interview: Britz Robins Talks Shambhala Music Festival

In less than a week, over 11,000 people from all walks of life will make the pilgrimage to Salmo, British Columbia for the 18th annual Shambhala Music Festival. In anticipation of this year's festival, we had the opportunity to interview Shambhala's Social Media Manager, Britz Robins.

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(Photo by Charlotte Dobre)

That’s great to hear from someone like yourself! A lot of people, at least with many parents, they can’t get over the drug stigma to see the goodness of it.

Britz: Yeah, I got over that a long time ago. I’ve been doing this rave thing for like 14 years…(laughter) And there used to be a lot of that perception in this area as well, but as time has gone on, people have come up here and seen what a professional production we are, and the level to which we have health and safety standards and really care about our people, our attendees. The public perception locally even has changed a lot since I’ve been working here, so nearly a decade now… I keep forgetting that I’ve been working here that long!

You’ve been able to show the surrounding community what festivals are all about. What are some of the other transformations that you’ve witnessed, and regarding Shambhala’s future, what are you most excited for and concerned about?

Britz: Well I mean, the public attitude towards harm reduction has really been shifting in the past couple years. And then, you know there’s still struggles. I don’t know if you saw that Evolve festival in Nova Scotia, they almost had their insurance pulled – this is a couple weeks ago. They were going to do some harm reduction. They were going to have pill testing, and their insurance company was threatening to pull insurance because they were going to be doing this pill testing so they actually had to scrap that part of the program and just do education. So I mean, there’s definitely still struggles, that’s the first I’ve heard of somewhere in Canada doing that, but I do know that’s a bigger issue in the states to offer pill testing.

So, in December I was at International Music Festival Conference, and Cameron Bowman, the Festival Lawyer, gave a big talk on the legalities of offering services like that at festivals in the U.S. People bring up the Rave Act all the time when you think about [testing], but actually there’s a misunderstanding – a very widely held public misunderstanding about what the Rave Act actually is.

There was an amendment to it shortly after it was put out that was not very publicly talked about. So it’s actually not as risky for festival promoters to offer those services as most of the public thinks it is. Cameron would be a better person to talk to about that because he knows the whole thing and gave this really great talk. But, you know, no one was even willing to talk about harm reduction 2 or 3 years ago, and even this past year at IMFCon, some of the audience was kind of scoffing that we even had a panel about drug testing, and harm reduction, and things like that.

There are actually festival promoters out there, more on the rock side of things, that think there are not drugs at their festivals… I’m sorry I don’t care what kind of music you have, I don’t care if it’s a country music festival – there’s drugs at your festival, let’s face reality. But, the public conversation about that has really been shifting, and I think Shambhala is at the forefront of that.

We had a lot of people at the festival last year from the U.S. who had never seen – well, I think we have one of the most comprehensive harm reduction programs in North America, and it doesn’t just include the drug education and pill testing. We have a clean camp for people who are in recovery and there are NA meetings 3 times a day. We have the sanctuary, which is this psychedelic crisis recovery area. We have our medical team which is pretty much like a field hospital, and then we have a couple other pillars of it as well.

No one who had come up from the U.S. had ever seen anything like it, so that ended up being one of the biggest stories that came out of last year, Shambhala’s approach to harm reduction. And I think that’s really carried the conversation forward for a lot of people in the states as well. I think the public attitude is changing pretty rapidly towards it, actually.