This article is part of a series originally published in French during and just after Whole 2025. Since they're so good, we decided the world should enjoy them too, so we translated them.
Last summer, Leslie discovered the Whole Festival and gave you an account of her three days at the world’s biggest queer festival. This year, she has again decided to share her impressions and all the details of her endless nights with you. Now that she’s recovered from her comedown, she’s chosen to talk about drug use.
Whole is an experience unlike any other: something that’s hard to put into words. There’s music, freedom, new encounters, but there are also drugs. And if this last report is coming well after the others, it’s because we had to come back from the ketamine highs and manage the comedown before we could reread it with a clear head.
While the festival organisers plan numerous awareness points and a sober tent, saying that drugs are an important part of the festival is an understatement. In Les Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire wrote: ‘Opium enlarges what has no limits, lengthens the infinite, deepens time, and intensifies pleasure.’ In the same way, drugs at Whole are not a way of escaping reality but of giving it more depth. Here, it seems to me, the aim of drug use is to enrich the experience; it’s not about escaping reality, but about giving it a depth that only drugs can provide. When we organise our trip to the festival, a significant part of the preparations involves planning our consumption, the substances we want to use and the quantities. I see the festival as a closed space-time outside of reality and everyday life, where I allow myself to completely disrupt my senses. It’s a kind of three-day carte blanche where natural needs like sleeping and eating take a back seat to the total festival experience. I’ve worked hard on my relationship with my everyday drug use in real life, but here I let myself be carried away by my desires.
But individual excesses must be accompanied by collective vigilance. I was returning to the festival site on Saturday night. In front of me was a group of gay guys, and I saw one of them collapse, unable to move. His friends carried on as if nothing had happened. I went over to the guy and was joined by a volunteer from the awareness tent. We accompanied him back to the tent. He was unable to give us any information, his friends had left him there. A little later that night, or rather the next morning, we found ourselves keeping company with a guy who couldn’t stand up, his eyes were closing, his legs wouldn’t carry him. We waited with him, trying to find out where his friends were. In the Telegram conversations, some people lamented the excessive consumption of G. For my part, and as I had been on certain nights out or afters in Paris, I don’t care if people consume this or that substance. I’m no stranger to it myself. But when I slumped against a bin, unable to tell where I was or what time it was, and it took me 45 minutes to type a message, I was very happy to be joined by a friend who looked after me until I came to my senses. Drug use is not harmless, it is not without risks, and it should make us attentive to one another. In a space where the senses are completely disrupted, it is essential that we take care of our loved ones and, beyond that, that we take care of others, whoever they may be.
Furthermore, I am quite surprised that there are not more measures in place at the festival to reduce the risks associated with drug use and sexual practices. Perhaps I only saw what interested me and didn’t pay much attention to the rest. I wonder to what extent our individual responsibilities towards those with whom we share the festival are linked to the prevention measures implemented by the organisers. It seems to me that this is where community care should mainly come into play in a space like the Whole.
At one point during the last night, I realised that I was happy to have discovered ketamine late in life. I don’t know if I could have continued to be a functional adult if I had discovered how dense, beautiful and delicious reality is when I entered adulthood. During the festival, I said that this drug made perfect sense here, because if there’s one reality we want to live more intensely, it’s the Whole experience: the lights, the scenery, the bodies, the pure joy. I wonder if I could experience this festival without drugs. I’m not even sure I want to. But I know I want to continue experiencing it with people who will sit next to a bin until I come to my senses, or friends with whom I will walk around the festival site as many times as necessary because they are having a bad trip. Drugs, yes, but above all: drugs and loved ones with whom to stretch reality and watch the lights blend into rainbows of pure joy.
WHOLE 2025
DAY 1 Like A Disco Ball
DAY 2 Let's Talk About Sex, Baby
DAY 3 Sex, Drugs & A Whole New World
BONUS Shit And Giggles
