Every time you spend money at a club, Satan has a baby.

Clubs are dens of iniquity, covered in filth and full of scum. When you support them, you support the criminals who usually run them. You'd be hard press to find a club that isn't in league with the underworld. Gangsters, bikers, and thugs all have hard-ons for the nightlife scene. They obsess over it the same way teenage girls obsess over Twilight. They don't necessarily want to own all the clubs, but they do want to control the drugs that move through them.

These crooks take your money, and then they re-invest it in wonderful things like human trafficking, drug smuggling, racketeering, and the arms trade. Giving money to a club is no different than giving money to the meanest, dumbest, most violent person you know. This mean bastard might let you listen to his music and dance in his apartment, but later that week when you're at home on the couch watching the Big Bang Theory, he'll be on a flight to Turkey, where he'll buy a dozen Ukrainian women with the help of the money you and your friends gave him. He'll then rape them, get them hooked on heroin, and pimp them out to a bunch of Wallstreet bankers. Your vices make the world a more terrible place.

Of course, not all clubs feed the underworld. Only most of them. Consider this one Montreal club that was recently shuttered. It had a name that would have made Shigeru Miyamoto proud. Its business practices? Not so much.

The club was brazen about its desire to control the flow of drugs that happened within its walls. You were frisked for illicit substances at the door, and if the bouncers found any on you, your stash would be confiscated only to be resold later by approved dealers. Folks who managed to sneak stuff in would live to regret their success if they were caught taking them by security. Not only would they get their drugs taken away from them, but their smuggling would be rewarded with a little battery, and maybe a touch of assault too.

The worst was reserved for small time peddlers who tried to deal on the premise, though. They could look forward to being dragged out to the back alley, where they'd have a couple of enforcers break their fingers. More than one ravewaver found this out the hard way after trying to sell some of their own supply to friends.

Most clubs are not nearly as aggressive as this place was, but that doesn't mean they're any less dirty. Clubs rarely make their money from selling tickets or alcohol. Their cash comes from selling drugs, and if you ever found out what their drug money was being spent on, you'd probably hate yourself for ever supporting them.

Want to have a good time and a clean conscience? Stick to smaller parties, one's that are too tiny for gangsters to bother with. And if you do buy drugs, try to get it from small operators who aren't affiliated with the kind of criminal organizations that rule over most of our city's nightlife. You'll sleep better at night.

Unless you're buying meth. Then you won't sleep at all.