Courtesy of the U.S. military and D.C. police, Buzz is dead. Nation, the club which hosted Buzz on friday nights, was threatened with the revocation of its liquor license if it didn’t give Buzz the boot. I’m not sure what this is supposed to accomplish. Apparently, this was all kickstarted by a few marines who managed to buy/gobble/dance-under-the-influence-of some controlled substance or other at a Buzz party. Well, I hate to break it to the guys, but whoever’s hosting the party, any place where there’s mass dancing without a strip-search prior to entry, someone is going to manage to get a few pills in if they’re that determined. So you’ve really got two choices if you’re going to be consistent, instead of arbitrarily targeting promoters. You can either ban dancing, a-la Footloose, or require club owners to slip on the rubber gloves and ensure that each person crossing the velvet ropes is clean as the driven snow — doubtless to similar effect. Now, that’s a disturbing idea. Any public space is, at least in principle, a potential forum for some illegal activity. Law enforcement can in effect do an end run around the 4th amendment by making those who provide such space responsible for performing suspicionless searches, as a condition of entry, that would be impermissible if carried out by police. A cop couldn’t come in and pull me off the dancefloor for a search without some justification, but apparently he /can/ require the owner, on pain of legal action, to do just that. Owners and promoters, then, are to be conscripted into the war on drugs, using the very fact of ownership to escape the constitutional restrictions binding conventional drug warriors.