A Changing Medellín and EDC Colombia 2026: How to Stay Safe — and Why to Avoid Tusi

A Changing Medellín and EDC Colombia 2026: How to Stay Safe — and Why to Avoid Tusi

Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) Colombia arrives in Medellín on Saturday, October 10 and Sunday, October 11, 2026, at the Unidad Deportiva Atanasio Girardot. It is the first EDC edition held in Colombia, produced by Insomniac with regional promoter Páramo Presenta, and it is expected to draw tens of thousands of Colombian and international attendees to an 18-and-over event running from the late afternoon into the early morning across multiple stages, with more than 80 announced artists.

For a city that spent the early 1990s as a global shorthand for cartel violence, hosting a festival of this scale is a milestone. It is also a public-health test. This article covers three things: how Medellín changed, how to stay safe across an EDC Colombia weekend, and why the pink powder sold locally as tusi is one of the most dangerous things a visitor can put in their body.

A City That Changed — and Is Still Changing

Medellín's turnaround is one of the most studied urban transformations in Latin America. From the early 2000s the city pursued what planners call social urbanism: deliberately placing high-quality public infrastructure in the poorest and most violent neighbourhoods rather than the wealthiest ones. Alongside and around new transit, the city built roughly 1.6 million square metres of new public space, including 25 parks, 11 promenades, and close to a dozen libraries, according to the International Association of Public Transport.

The Metro, the Metrocable aerial cable-car lines connecting hillside comunas to the network, the Comuna 13 escalators, and the parques biblioteca library-park system became the visible symbols of that approach. The library parks were sited by design in neighbourhoods with the highest levels of violence, functioning as neutral community space and drawing thousands of daily visitors.

The security numbers moved with it. Medellín's homicide rate stood near 380 per 100,000 residents in 1991. By 2024 it had fallen to 12.18 per 100,000 — the city's lowest in eight decades — and in 2026 municipal figures put the rate on track for single digits for the first time on record, with February and May 2026 among the least violent months in fifty years, as reported by Caracol Radio.

None of this makes the transformation finished, and honest accounts resist the tidy narrative. Analysts at Colombia's Fundación Ideas para la Paz note that part of the decline reflects criminal organisations choosing to use lethal violence less as a tool of control — not their disappearance. Inequality persists, extortion and territorial control continue in parts of the city, and interpersonal and gender-based violence now account for a large share of remaining homicides. Visitors should hold both truths: extraordinary progress, and a living city with unresolved problems — not a backdrop for cartel tourism.

Staying Safe Across an EDC Colombia Weekend

Hydration and heat

Medellín's climate is mild, but a dense crowd at a two-night festival is not. Dehydration and heat exhaustion are the most common reasons people need medical help at large electronic events.

• Drink water steadily through the night rather than in occasional large amounts.
• Bring an empty, clear refillable bottle or hydration pack and use the free refill stations — check the venue's permitted-items list first.
• Alcohol accelerates dehydration. Alternate with water and eat before and during the event.
• Step out of the crowd and into cooler, less dense space at the first sign of dizziness, cramping, or nausea.
• Review the organiser's official health and wellness guidance, such as Insomniac's EDC health and wellness page, alongside whatever EDC Colombia publishes for the Medellín edition.

Protecting your belongings

Opportunistic theft is the most likely crime a visitor to Medellín will encounter, and festival crowds concentrate the risk.

• Carry your phone, cash, and one card in a front-facing fanny pack, a zipped crossbody or chest bag, or deep zippered pockets — never a loose back pocket.
• Leave your passport at your accommodation and carry a photo or copy instead.
• Never set a bag down on the ground unattended, even briefly.
• Do not display expensive phones, jewellery, or watches on the street, in taxis, or while waiting for rides. Locals summarise this as "no dar papaya" — don't hand over the opportunity.
• Use official ride-hailing apps or transport arranged by your accommodation rather than hailing cars on the street late at night.

Crowds, navigation, and staying together

• Agree on a specific, hard-to-miss meeting point before you enter — a locker bank, a particular art installation, or an info booth. "By the stage" is not a plan.
• Agree on a meeting time as well, in case phone batteries die or the network saturates. Bring a power bank.
• Save your accommodation's address in writing, in Spanish, and screenshot it in case you have no signal.
• In a heavy crowd surge, stay calm, keep your hands up near your chest to protect breathing space, and move diagonally with the flow rather than against it.
• Tell someone in your group if you feel unwell, and do not let a friend who is struggling wander off alone.

Why You Should Not Take Tusi in Medellín

Anyone spending a festival weekend in Medellín will probably be offered a pink powder called tusi, tusibí, tuci, or "pink cocaine." The single most useful thing to understand is that the name describes a colour, not a substance.

Tusi is neither 2C-B nor cocaine. Colombia's Ministry of Justice describes it as a variable-composition mixture that has been found to contain as many as nine different psychoactive substances in a single sample, with the exact contents depending on local availability and whoever prepared the batch — commonly ketamine, MDMA, MDA, methamphetamine, caffeine, and paracetamol, and also PMMA, oxycodone, tramadol, clonazepam, cocaine, and synthetic cathinones, according to a Minjusticia public alert. Drug-checking data are consistent internationally: an analysis of 470 samples found ketamine in 93.2% and MDMA in 92.1%, with 2C-B in only 3.6% and cocaine in 0.2%, in research indexed by Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reached the same conclusion in its early-warning advisory.

Four specific reasons this matters at a festival:

• You cannot dose something with no formula. Ratios vary batch to batch — in one set of samples ketamine made up roughly 40% to 90% of the powder, per analysis published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Two lines from two different bags are not the same dose or even the same drug.
• Adulterants are causing severe physical harm in Colombia right now. Colombian clinicians have raised alarms about vascular complications and amputations linked to tusi consumption, associated with adulterants including levamisole and the veterinary sedative xylazine, as reported by Caracol Radio and by Infobae, citing the Colombian Rheumatology Association. Toxicologists at Universidad CES in Medellín have warned that what circulates is not a defined substance but combinations that can include antidepressants, psychiatric medications, opioids, and ketamine, according to Universidad CES.
• Opioids turn up in pink powder. Laboratory testing has identified pink powders containing cocaine and fentanyl, and fentanyl with xylazine, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration. A stimulant-seeking user who unknowingly takes an opioid is at risk of respiratory depression — and naloxone does not reverse xylazine.
• The dissociative content is a crowd-safety problem. Ketamine at festival doses impairs balance, coordination, and awareness of surroundings, in a dark venue with dense crowds, stairs, and vehicle traffic outside. Combined with alcohol, the sedation compounds.

The straightforward advice is not to take it. There is no safe way to dose an unidentified mixture, and the sellers themselve