What Happens If You Are From Out Of State, But You Get Caught With Illegal Drugs In Pennsylvania?

Some events are worth traveling lost distances to attend, and many of these events are several orders of magnitude less fun when you are sober.  Without the booze, Mardi Gras in New Orleans would just mean watching high school marching bands perform while socialites wave from glitzy parade floats.  Imagine Woodstock without the drugs.  Anyone with basic search engine skills can find longform journalism pieces about what a miserable experience it is to attend Burning Man when you are sober; if the authors’ experiences are representative, all you can think about is how much you miss water, Internet connectivity, and people who make sense.  It is no secret that many outdoor festivals are full of drugs, and just as the attendees have arrived from out of state, so have the drugs.  All drug possession and drug trafficking incidents where someone gets caught with drugs in Pennsylvania go through the criminal courts of Pennsylvania.  If you got arrested for drug possession while you were visiting Pennsylvania to attend a music festival, contact a Pittsburgh drug crimes lawyer.

Drugs and Music Festivals

Every summer, the Elements Music and Arts Festival descends on Pocono Raceway in Monroe County, Pennsylvania.  Not only do electronic dance music (EDM) artists perform concert sets, but the idea is that all of the attendees are performers.  If you walk out into the woods beyond the raceway, you will find concertgoers improvising their own performances through dance and visual arts.  EDM concerts are known for promoting a feeling of connectedness among the audience, but they do not achieve it through music alone.  Empathogenic and entheogenic drugs such as MDMA and LSD are as popular at electronic music concerts now as they were at Grateful Dead concerts a generation ago.  In 2022, several people suffered drug overdoses at the festival, although all of them survived.  At music festivals as elsewhere, you get legal protections if you render assistance to an overdose victim, but you can get increased penalties if you provide drugs that cause an overdose.

In the News

This year, police arrested 11 people for drug-related offenses at the Elements festival.  On the first day of the festival, police responded to a call about an overdose, and this led to an investigation which led to the arrest of 11 attendees and searches of the residences of two of them.  By the time the festival was over, police had confiscated LSD, cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine pills, ketamine, psilocybin mushrooms, Adderall, MDA, MDMA, nitrous oxide, and miscellaneous, thus far unidentified, pills and powders.  Some of the defendants are from Pennsylvania, but others are from Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts.

Contact Gary E. Gerson About Drug Possession Cases

A criminal defense lawyer can help you if you were arrested for drug possession at a music festival in Pennsylvania.  Contact the law offices of Gary E. Gerson in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania about your case.

Sources:

pahomepage.com/news/crime-courts/11-charged-with-selling-drugs-at-monroe-county-elements-festival/

pahomepage.com/news/elements-music-and-arts-festival-comes-to-monroe-county/