The Skyrocketing Death Toll Of The Modern Music Festival

There you are, blissfully passed out in the mud after a wild afternoon of dancing to some of your favorite bands, and next thing you know, a fucking tractor runs over you. Welcome to the modern music festival. Buy a ticket, have a few laughs and hope to hell you don't die because audience mortality is no longer a phenomenon; it is as common as portable toilets and sunburn.Although fatalities have been part and parcel of music festivals since the Sixties, nothing rivals the skyrocketing death count plaguing the EDM scene in the past few years. Six deaths blighted the 2014 Future Music Festival in Malaysia and  3 more perished at the 2014 A State Of Trance festival in Jakarta, followed by one more a year later. As the trend strengthens globally, audience fatalities have ravaged the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Canada's Pemberton Music Festival, New York's Electric Zoo Festival and the UK's Outbreak festival. This past August, at the Pomona, California HARD Music Festival, two teenage girls died of suspected overdoses, inspiring the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to call for at least a temporary ban on raves on L.A. County property. Further inquiries revealed that nearly fifty ravers from the HARD festival required emergency medical services, galvanizing ER doctors to join with county officials to put a stop to such events, at least until some workable approach for addressing the underlying problems can be identified. Alarmingly, this list represents only a small fraction of music festival deaths in the past decade.I don't think I'm dropping any bombs by noting that drugs figure prominently in this discussion — and at EDM festivals, the drug of choice is some form of Ecstasy — with the media and municipal officials lazily writing off most fatalities as overdoses. In fact, while overdoses do occur at these shows, more often than not, OD victims survive after a trip to the ER. Contrary to prevailing response, the overwhelming cause of death at summer festivals is not drugs, but heat stroke, with the victims succumbing to a lethal combination of dehydration, prolonged exposure to the sun, vigorous physical activity (dancing or just walking around for two days), and yes, those shady synthetic drugs that feel so damned good as they sever the connection between a person's senses and their brains. As symptoms arise - nausea, sun burns, light-headedness and similar conditions that cause a normal person to stop and take a break — the massive torrents of dopamine coursing through the system render the brain incapable of processing the signals the body is sending. Ravers often take even more drugs to keep going, and at some point, the body cashes out. I was at an outdoor metal festival in Arizona couple years back — on a day that wasted no time reaching the 90s — and the venue allowed everybody to bring in one sealed gallon of water — a smart and easy solution for heat and dyehydration, but this approach benfits the people who are already acting responsibly. Telling some wild-eyed dude wearing Mickey Mouse ears, bedazzled in glow sticks and all pilled-up on X to just hydrate more is the equivalent of a doctor telling a heart attack victim to take two aspirin and call him in the morning. Over-hydration causes sodium levels to plummet, which results in seizures so profound that the victim loses the ability to breathe, leading to a coma and possibly death.Look, this piece is in no way intended as some frothy, overly-dramatic "Just Say No" piece. People should and will do what they want but they need to understand that there's a big difference between popping a hit of X in a club and going home after a few hours of dancing, and popping several hits of X and standing in the blistering sun for two days without food, sleep or adequate water. Though EDM shows are seeing more than their fair share of tragedy, other genres also face this epidemic. At the 2010 Bonnaroo Festival — an annual event that draws upwards of 80,000 fans into the skin-bubbling heat of Manchester, Tennessee — one guy died of heat stroke, notching a body temperature of 108 degrees. A year later, that festival added two more deaths to its escalating toll, with a 32 year-old woman dying of heat-related issues and a 24 year-old man dying of hyperthermia. With the death of a forty-seven year-old man at the 2015 event, Bonnaroo has now claimed twelves lives.It's not just reckless drugging behind these numbers; poorly-planned logistics and pure fucking stupidity often lead to wide-scale and maddeningly-foreseeable tragedies. In 2010, a staggering twenty-one people were trampled to death, and 500 more injured, at the Love Parade music festival in Duisburg, Germany. Organizers had closed the entrances to the festival after deciding that the 1.4 million people inside was officially too many. One of the blocked entrances was at the far end of a 200 meter tunnel but amazingly, the front end was left open. Hundreds of people entered the tunnel without realizing the other end was blocked, creating a chamber of death for the people stuck at the far end, who could neither move forward nor retreat. The cause of death for all twenty-one people was suffocation — an incomprehensibly terrifying way to die. More recently, as Pearl Jam played Roskilde, Denmark in 2000, nine fans were trampled to death as the crowd surged toward the stage. By the time the band stopped playing to help organizers control the crowd, it was too late.Festival deaths are not new to the age of synthetic drugs, either. The original Woodstock music festival in 1969 — that 500,000-strong paragon of peace, love and LSD-powered counterculture — yielded three deaths: an 18 year-old Vietnam veteran who overdosed on heroin, a guy whose appendix burst during the festival (which was long on acid but short on doctors) and the tragic and utterly bizarre death of a 17 year-old kid snoozing in the mud. Snoozing in his sleeping bag and oblivious to the sights and sounds around him, some jackass figured it might be fun to take a joyride around Yasgur's farm on a nearby tractor, tragically running over the boy and murdering him in cold blood. The driver was never identified.The most infamous festival death is, beyond question, the fatal stabbing of Rolling Stones concertgoer Meredith Hunter by a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club — a crime inadvertently caught on camera in the movie Gimme Shelter. With the Hells Angels MC providing security at the free show at the Altamont Speedway, the situation had badly devolved long before the Stones arrived in their helicopter, with reports of the bikers beating on the fans with pool cues and chains and the audience fighting right back. Hunter, reportedly out of his mind on drugs, was seen to try to hop on stage during one number, but was pulled back into the crowd. Hunter's girlfriend pleaded with him to calm down, but Hunter, violent, unreasonable and enraged in a druggy hubris, instead moved on the stage. At 3:37 in the video below — not graphic, but disturbing in that the grainy footage captures an actual murder— you can make out Hunter in a lime green suit, careening to the ground. Eyewitnesses reported that he had just drawn and raised a .22 caliber pistol and pointed it into the air, which is all but impossible to see on this video. You can however, see one of the Angels retaliating by plunging a knife into Hunter, ending his life. Three other deaths occurred at that concert as well, though none as infamous as Hunter's.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShLJnqMg__s Concert deaths are not exclusive to large outdoor festivals. Eleven people died at a 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati, in an indoor venue when a rush for General Admission real estate gathering into a fatal stampede. In one of the most notorious concert disasters of all time, one hundred people died at a 2003 Great White concert at a small Rhode Island nightclub, trying to flee a raging fire that was started by a stupefyingly ill-advised pyrotechnics show that went awry. You'd be wrong to think that any lessons were learned from this grisly clusterfuck. In fact, the Great White tragedy claimed about half of the fatalities that resulted from a 2004 Callejeros concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 194 out of 3000 attendees died in that show when a criminally stupid fan lit off some fireworks in the small club, which had locked its doors to keep people from sneaking in, turning the club into a live crematorium.Who’s to blame?The easy targets are always the organizers and club owners, who are often (quite rightly) accused of placing their bottom lines above the safety of the crowd. When a venue packs in more fans than its allotted capacity, what little safeguards are in place become virtually impotent. And when thousands of people cram into a general admission floor, security teams can’t even see into the middle of the crowd, much less get there in time to help someone who might be getting crushed. But what about personal responsibility? It’s no secret that concerts and drugs go hand-in-hand, and where prodigious substance intake is paired with heat, humidity and dense crowds, serious casualties are all but assured. Nobody who pops a hit of X plans on anything but jumping around for a few hours in a shimmery state of euphoric warmth, but let's face it — unless you're the person who made the pills, you have no idea what's in them or how to manage it; that's why they're always different colors. And what of the individuals who race to the front of the stage, seemingly impervious to the people writhing beneath their feet? Shouldn’t they shoulder some blame in such circumstances? Just because a concert is a special occasion for you doesn’t entitle you to set aside basic human decency just to get a few meters closer to the stage.The solution is shared by all parties. From the kid holding the concert ticket to the promoter flying the band in for the show, there are basic notions common sense and safety that can guarantee a memorably festive occasion for everybody.  If you’re at a festival this summer, have fun, don't be a dick and make sure that while you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not making someone else pay the price.