Should Electric Zoo Have Been Cancelled After Overdose Deaths?

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At any big music festival, organizers expect to run across some drug use and even a serious injury or two. Now and again, they may even have to deal with someone dying. That’s the downside of packing more than one hundred thousand people into a confined space. Unfortunately, at this weekend’s Electric Zoo Festival in Randall’s Island, New York, there were quite a few more incidents, so many, in fact, that organizers decided to pull the plug.

According to The New York Daily News, concertgoers Jeffrey Russ, 23, and Olivia Rotondo, 20, both died during the first two days of the festival of suspected drug overdoses. In addition, a further four people remain in New York City intensive care units. It’s assumed all took MDMA/ Molly, or a drug they thought to be MDMA, but despite being experienced partygoers, something obviously went wrong.

Organizers of the Electric Zoo Festival aren’t stupid. They might not admit so publically, but they no damn good and well a high percentage of their audience is under the influence of drugs during the performances. As such, places to get water and areas where one can see a doctor are littered throughout the site. In theory, one would have thought those stations would prevent tragedies, but they clearly weren’t enough.

After reviewing all of the evidence at hand, officials from New York City stepped in and asked organizers to cancel the final day of Electric Zoo in order to prevent more deaths, either from irresponsible drug use or the taking of inferior or laced drugs. After much consideration, the powers that be decided to do exactly that, and as you can imagine, the decision has not gone over very well with quite a few people who waited an entire year to see some of the acts scheduled to perform on the last day.

It’s easy to see why they’d be so pissed off. After all, it’s not as if they did anything they should be punished for. On the other hand, however, it’s hard to fault organizers for trying to play it safe.

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Mack Rawden
Editor In Chief

Mack Rawden is the Editor-In-Chief of CinemaBlend. He first started working at the publication as a writer back in 2007 and has held various jobs at the site in the time since including Managing Editor, Pop Culture Editor and Staff Writer. He now splits his time between working on CinemaBlend’s user experience, helping to plan the site’s editorial direction and writing passionate articles about niche entertainment topics he’s into. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in English (go Hoosiers!) and has been interviewed and quoted in a variety of publications including Digiday. Enthusiastic about Clue, case-of-the-week mysteries, a great wrestling promo and cookies at Disney World. Less enthusiastic about the pricing structure of cable, loud noises and Tuesdays.