Nearly three years after her daughter's death, Phyllis Kirkland still visits her grave every day. She drives over from the Monroeville, Ala., dentist's office where she works. She weeps. Jillian was only 17--"a beautiful 17," her mom chokes--when she died from a drug overdose after a sweaty night of dancing at the State Palace Theatre, a nightclub about a four-hour drive away, in New Orleans.
Jillian's August 1998 death crushed her mom, but it may also change how the U.S. government fights its war on drugs like ecstasy. Jillian's overdose--the coroner can't say precisely from what--and the sad 16 days she clung to life at Charity Hospital enraged doctors there. Federal agents began investigating, and in January a grand jury indicted three of the men who ran the club under a novel application of a 1986 law called the Crack House Statute. It prohibits maintaining a property "for the purpose of...distributing or using a controlled substance." Congress wrote the law to go after sleazebag landlords who let dealers and addicts hide the crack trade in slums. This is the first time prosecutors have used it against a nightclub, and drug enforcers and club owners across the U.S. are watching the case.
What's new about this drug-war strategy is that it does not require the government to show that the defendants--brothers Robert and Brian Brunet, who managed the State Palace, and Donnie Estopinal, who promoted its raves--were actually selling drugs. And so far, the government has offered no evidence that they were, though investigators have been digging for well over a year.
Rather, U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan plans to argue that the defendants looked the other way as druggies turned the State Palace into a kind of crack house for club drugs. Cops say it was a place where partiers could easily score hits of ecstasy and acid without getting hassled by club staff, and where the staff encouraged the pharmacological festivities by selling rave-culture gear such as glow sticks and pacifiers. These are silly fashion accessories for many ravers, but they can be drug-related too: glow sticks stimulate dilated pupils; pacifiers relieve the teeth grinding associated with ecstasy.
The Brunets and Estopinal say they did everything they could to keep their parties sober. They and their A.C.L.U. lawyers also argue that those who provide music should not be blamed for its devotees' crimes. But the case raises an important question: Given that the use of ecstasy continues to soar, is there any way to stop club drugs without stopping the raves? Could music be to blame for what happened to Jillian Kirkland?