Exit’s Anti-Drugs Campaign is Just Virtue-Signaling

This tagline is followed by billboards showing the same tagline together with graphic images of where users' drugs quite possibly do come from - including sellers' hairy bottoms and filthy underwear. A message reminds people that drugs are often transported to users via such horrible channels, so everyone should stay off them.

The second part of the website, tagged "Now seriously", then provides certain information on some of the commonly used substances, and sketchy statistics on their likely results, albeit without any listed sources. Controversial claims include LSD "flashbacks", that users' IQs drop due to cannabis use and linking the presence of THC in the blood of some people who committed suicide.

The Exit festival started in the summer of 2000, in the wake of the democratic movement that would topple the regime in Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic just a few months later.

The original 100-day festival, which was openly anti-Milosevic and represented an "Exit out of ten years of madness", finished just days before presidential elections that would mark the end of Milosevic's rule.

In the years to come, the festival became one of the biggest and best-known festivals in Southeast Europe, winning many awards and gaining a reputation worldwide.

For the regional audience, it was one of the few windows into global music culture, bringing artists who it was unthinkable would have come to play in Serbia only a few years earlier.

Likewise, local audiences had a chance to meet fellow festivalgoers from around the world at a time when travel and contact with foreigners was still quite scarce. Serbian nationals did not obtain access to the EU's passport-free Schengen area until in 2009.

Festival-goers pass through a gate at the...

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