A Changing Medellín and EDC Colombia 2026: How to Stay Safe — and Why to Avoid Tusi | International Society of Substance Use Professionals

EDC Colombia 2026 Medellín safety guide graphic warning festival visitors 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.

Travellers still comparing neighbourhoods, property types, and group accommodations can use this guide to Medellín vacation rentals for EDC Colombia 2026. It covers practical considerations such as location, group size, amenities, venue transportation, and booking early for the festival weekend.

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 themselves do not know what is in it. If someone in your group nevertheless intends to use, harm-reduction basics still apply: never use alone, never mix with alcohol or other depressants, tell a sober friend what was taken, and know that Colombia has an established drug-checking service — Échele Cabeza, which has worked more than 205 parties and festivals and analysed over 6,800 samples — operating within Colombia's national psychoactive-substance policy framework.

When to get emergency help

Call for on-site festival medics or Colombia's emergency line 123 immediately for any of the following: unresponsiveness or difficulty waking someone, slow or irregular breathing, seizure, chest pain, very high body temperature with hot dry skin or confusion, repeated vomiting, or an inability to keep fluids down.

Do not delay because of fear of getting in trouble. Festival medical teams exist to treat people, and delay is what turns a survivable situation into a fatal one. Stay with the person, move them to cooler air, and keep them on their side if they are vomiting.

Where You Stay Affects How Safely You Recover

Accommodation is a genuine safety variable across a two-night festival, not just a comfort one. A group that can cook, sleep in quiet, keep valuables in one secured place, and coordinate transport together will recover better than one splitting into separate hotel rooms and street taxis at 4 a.m.

For travelling groups, one festival-weekend option is the BNZ Mansion villa rental in Medellín, a five-bedroom vacation rental in the Las Palmas area of El Poblado with shared living space for groups. Its location and guest reviews on Google Maps show the hillside setting and driving distance to the Atanasio Girardot venue, and the house is bookable as a group Airbnb in Medellín. Whatever you book, confirm the address, capacity, distance from the venue, house rules, cancellation terms, and late-night transport options in advance, and check that the rental complies with local requirements.

Recovery between festival days is mostly unglamorous: sleep, food, oral fluids with electrolytes, and shade. Medellín also has a commercial wellness sector serving visitors, including nurse-delivered mobile options such as Drip Colombia, an IV drip service in Medellín whose licensed nurses attend hotels, apartments, and vacation rentals across El Poblado, Laureles, and Envigado — its Google Maps listing carries service details and reviews. Understand the limits before booking: intravenous vitamin and hydration therapy is a commercial wellness offering, not a treatment for intoxication, overdose, or withdrawal, and evidence that it outperforms oral rehydration in otherwise healthy adults is limited. Anyone with a medical condition, or who is pregnant or taking medication, should consult a qualified clinician first, and anyone showing the emergency signs listed above needs emergency care, not an infusion appointment.

Medellín Beyond the Festival

EDC Colombia is a reason to come, but the city rewards the days around it: the botanical gardens, Parque Explora, the Museo de Antioquia, the Metrocable ride up to Santo Domingo and the España library park, the Comuna 13 escalators visited with a local guide, Guatapé, and the neighbourhood markets and restaurants of Laureles and Envigado. Engaging with the city's transformation on its own terms — through the communities and public projects that produced it — is a better souvenir than a cartel tour.

Come for the music, look after each other, skip the pink powder, and treat Medellín as somebody's home.

Sources

EDC Colombia official site — https://colombia.electricdaisycarnival.com/en/
Insomniac press release, EDC Colombia lineup and dates — https://press.insomniac.com/blog/edc-colombia-announces-over-80-artists-for-debut-edition-october-10-11-2026
Teleantioquia, EDC Colombia 18+ policy and gate times — https://www.teleantioquia.co/entretenimiento/el-festival-de-electronica-mas-grande-del-mundo-llega-a-medellin-conozca-el-cartel-oficial-del-edc-colombia-2026-580800
UITP, Medellín public transport and urban transformation — https://www.uitp.org/news/how-medellin-colombia-public-transport-urban-transformation/
Caracol Radio, Medellín homicide figures 2026 — https://caracol.com.co/2026/06/04/medellin-completa-10-dias-sin-homicidios-tras-registrar-el-mes-de-mayo-menos-violentos-en-50-anos/
Fundación Ideas para la Paz analysis, via Infobae — https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/03/07/fundacion-ideas-para-la-paz-responde-a-petro-y-cuestiona-que-la-reduccion-de-homicidios-en-medellin-se-atribuya-solo-a-la-politica-de-paz/
Ministerio de Justicia de Colombia, public alert on tusi composition — https://www.minjusticia.gov.co/Sala-de-prensa/Paginas/Minjusticia-alerta-a-ciudadania-sobre-mezcla-peligrosa-de-sustancias-del-tusi-y-hace-llamado-a-prevencion.aspx
Ministerio de Salud de Colombia, tusi / tusibí / cocaína rosada factsheet — https://www.minsalud.gov.co/sites/rid/Lists/BibliotecaDigital/RIDE/DE/COM/folleto-tusi.pdf
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, "Tusibí: ni 2C-B ni cocaína rosa," 470-sample analysis — https://produccioncientifica.ucm.es/documentos/690e44c60191bb4204a1b6a2?lang=en
UNODC Early Warning Advisory on "tuci" — https://www.unodc.org/LSS/announcement/Details/206a7d54-8ef3-4012-8943-fcfac98644e6
Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, "What Is Pink Cocaine? The Dark Reality behind a Colorful Name" — https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.4c02821
Palamar, "Tusi: a new ketamine concoction complicating the drug landscape" — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10636235/
US Drug Enforcement Administration, pink cocaine laboratory findings — https://www.dea.gov/pink-cocaine
Caracol Radio, alert on amputations linked to tusi — https://caracol.com.co/2026/05/28/ni-quienes-venden-saben-que-contiene-alerta-por-amputaciones-ligadas-al-consumo-de-tusi/
Infobae, Colombian Rheumatology Association on limb complications — https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/05/28/asociacion-colombiana-de-reumatologia-califico-como-alarmante-el-aumento-de-pacientes-con-complicaciones-en-sus-extremidades-por-consumo-de-tusi/
Universidad CES, Medellín toxicology warning on tusi — https://www.ces.edu.co/noticia/tusi-medellin-riesgos-farmacos-veterinarios-universidad-ces/
Échele Cabeza, drug checking at festivals — https://www.echelecabeza.com/los-analisis-de-drogas-en-festivales-salvan-vidas/
Insomniac EDC health and wellness guidance — https://lasvegas.edc.com/guide/health-wellness/

Substance Abuse & Recovery in Medellín