During a psychedelic high, I realized I want to stop drinking. The sentence that came through was simple: “I want to go sober for love.”
Not for health. Not for productivity. Not because a doctor told me to or because I hit some dramatic rock bottom. For love. Whatever that meant in that moment — love for the work, love for the people who show up every weekend, love for the version of myself that doesn’t wake up with cuts on his hands and no memory of how they got there — it landed hard enough to stick.
The next day I was planning a full reset. Cut caffeine, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, all of it. A 30-day dopamine reset. I even considered shaving my head as a deliberate transformation marker — burn the image, start clean. The full dramatic arc.
Here’s the thing about running raves and going sober: nobody thinks you’re serious. The guy who books 12-hour techno events and runs a harm reduction table at his own parties is now telling you he wants to quit drinking. The irony writes itself.
But the irony is the point. I’ve been inside the scene long enough to know what it does to people. The scene is a meat grinder. Vices pushed to 11. Most get swallowed up by drugs. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve been part of it. I convinced myself for years that I needed alcohol to socialize and get gigs. There are plenty of extremely successful people doing great without it. That took too long to learn.
I woke up one Monday morning in CDMX with cuts on my hand and a scratch on my forehead and without my phone. Nothing was too serious. I took it as a big warning. The hierarchy was already clear by then — psychedelics felt fine, alcohol was the real problem. But knowing that and acting on it are different things when your entire social world runs on open bars and afterparty culture.
The sobriety isn’t a brand play. I tried partying completely sober and couldn’t enjoy it. That’s honest. The experiments failed more than they succeeded. But the direction is the direction — less substances, more control, fewer mornings I can’t account for.
I started framing it as dark culture discipline. Not the wellness-influencer version of sobriety with green juice and gratitude journals. The operator version. Being sharper, clearer, harder than the average raver. Sobriety as an edge, not a retreat.
Work replaced drugs more than willpower did. When the operational demands scaled up — marketing, bookings, door, bar, stage design, all solo — there was less room for the blur. Barely smoking weed anymore. One hit every two weeks, no stash. The substance use didn’t stop because of a moral reckoning. It stopped because the work got bigger than the high.
I still run harm reduction at every event. SafeRaveNYC at the table with fentanyl strips and social support. That partnership exists because I know what the community goes through. I’m not outside it looking in. I’m inside it trying to build something that doesn’t require people to destroy themselves to participate.
The psychedelic insight didn’t solve anything permanently. It opened a door. Walking through it is the ongoing work.