Phish Fans Are Weak Drug Users

03/10/09 12:09pm

by Steve McLean (CHARTattack)

Phish fans are either getting straighter or smarter. It's probably not the latter.

About 75,000 of them attended Phish's three-night stand at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Va. over the weekend. It was the first time the jam band had performed together in almost five years, and the show was a teaser for a tour that's scheduled to start in June.

Of those 75,000 concert-goers, 194 were arrested — primarily for drug possession, use and distribution. Police say they also confiscated about $1.2 million worth of illegal drugs and more than $68,000 in cash. While that may initially sound like a lot, let's do some math:

Take the estimated attendance and divide it by the number of arrests, and it turns out that just 0.26 per cent of Phish fans were collared by the man.

Now take the value of the narcotic seizure and divide it by the number of arrests. It works out to $6,185 per person. Even if you assume not everyone who got their stash taken away was arrested, which would decrease that value, it's still a high number.

Divide the amount of cash confiscated, which you'd assume would have to be from transactions police witnessed or else they'd have no way of proving the money was drug-related, by the number of arrests. It comes out to $350 per person.

If you assume the drug of choice for most hippie Phish fans is marijuana, and that an ounce sells for $150 to $320 depending on the quality, it works out to one or two ounces per person caught making a deal.

So what can we conclude from all of this?

If just 0.26 per cent of concert attendees were arrested for drugs, it could be that Phish fans are pretty savvy about avoiding detection. I don't think they're that clever, so maybe there weren't that many true stoners in attendance.

If each person arrested had more than $6,000 worth of goodies, he or she obviously wasn't selling their wares too quickly — which suggests a lack of willing customers.

The per-person value of the cash seized by the cops works out to 35 dime bags, which would easily fit in those baggy pants with the big pockets favoured by many hippies. That isn't much — just enough to share with their friends who they rented a school bus with to get to the gig.

So while the mainstream media may raise an alarm about rampant narcotics use as a result of Phish's return to the stage, it actually turns out — according to the hard, scientific data presented above — that jam band fans aren't getting as high as many of us would expect.

Come on, hippies, it's the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this year. Get out of your mini vans and celebrate it the way they did back then. Make Wavy Gravy proud.

Let's hope we can get better drug bust tallies from these Phish reunion shows:

June 4-5 Wantagh, NY @ Nikon at Jones Beach Theater
June 6 Mansfield, MA @ Comcast Center
June 7 Camden, NJ @ Susquehanna Bank Center
June 9 Asheville, NC @ Asheville Civic Center
June 10 Knoxville, TN @ Thompson-Boling Arena
June 12, 14 Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival
June 16 St. Louis, MO @ Fox Theatre
June 18 Burgettstown, PA @ Post Gazette Pavilion
June 19 Indianapolis, IN @ Verizon Wireless Music Center
June 20-21 East Troy, WI @ Alpine Valley Music Theater