While the deaths of the 19-year-old man this year and the 15-year-old girl last year at the respective Electric Daisy Carnival events are tragedies in their own rites, and certainly to the friends and families of each, these deaths are not the outrageous horrors that the media often portrays them to be.
The media, and some self-serving politicians, are often quick to suggest or directly point blame at events like EDC as the cause of death, that these events are a social evil and a killer of our youth. Obviously this is not the case. People die all the time for all kind of reasons. It is not uncommon for people to die during large events for a variety of reasons, exhaustion, heat, age, alcohol or drug related causes, violence, accidents, etc. Aside from various political, economic, and social reasons one of the big reasons these electronic music events get a bad rap is the association and expectation of the involvement of drugs. While it is true that there are those that take drugs at these events (of course drugs are taken everywhere, including Disneyland) not all the attendants are on drugs and the number of drug related deaths and injuries are way below the societal norm.
Every year in the US, for every 100,000 people .15% of deaths are drug related and .16% are alcohol related vs. the .00001% of people who have had drug related deaths at EDC in the last two years. Clearly these events are not the problem when we look at the numbers. Further, every year in the US, for every 100,000 people 4.4% die as a result of an accident (41% of which is vehicle related). You are 1681 times more likely to die in an auto accident than you are from a drug related incident at EDC. And yet, I don’t ever see any talk of banning automobiles.
Finally, these deaths resulted from the choices that the individuals made, not because the event or the promoters made them do it or provided the drugs. These choices could have been made anywhere, the resulting deaths could have occurred anywhere, they just happened to have occurred at EDC.
While any death is a tragedy, don’t buy into the hype that these events are some great evil plague upon children. The media and politicians are self-serving and hype up anything they can to improve their numbers. But the real numbers are there.
That being said, for those of you attending these things, be smart, please. Moderation is always the best route. Drink water, avoid drugs (or at least keep it to a reasonable level of moderation), take rest breaks from dancing, eat, sleep, live.
Not Your Jukebox 