A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Earlier this month in Pomona, two young women died from suspected overdoses at an electronic dance music festival held at the Fairplex -- a property owned by Los Angeles County.
Despite those deaths, L.A. County supervisors agreed last week to allow another EDM festival to go on at that Pomona location over Halloween weekend. The festival’s promoter, Live Nation, did agree to cancel an EDM event that was going to take place there on Sept. 10, and they agreed to certain restrictions for the Halloween event. Among them: limiting attendance to 40,000 per day, and attendees will have to be at least 21 years old.
But last Friday, several L.A. emergency room doctors blasted the supervisors’ decision, saying these events are a threat to public health and safety. Among them was Dr. Brian Johnston, he’s chair of the emergency medicine department at White Memorial Medical Center.
Dr. Johnston spoke with The Frame’s John Horn.
Two women died just this month at Hard Summer at the Fairplex in Pomona — both under 21 and apparently died from drug overdoses. As an emergency room physician, what do you see as a doctor when you look at EDM concerts and kids who are coming in from there?
Well, I see a very perilous situation. When they were doing them in the [L.A. Memorial] Coliseum, we saw a lot of kids. I saw 16- and 18-year-old kids with heart attacks ... We had one who came in with a temperature of 108 [degrees], convulsing, destroyed all his skeletal muscles, he damaged his kidneys. He spent 28 days in the intensive care unit and was discharged on hemodialysis. And when I went to the hearings on raves in the Coliseum, there were parents there with kids who had suffered significant brain damage during those events.
What are the kinds of drugs these kids are taking and what are the symptoms of overdosing outside of high temperature?
Well, most of the kids are taking MDMA, methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, which is a sister compound to methamphetamine. They may be taking other things as well. It’s really hard to know, which makes it more difficult to treat them, but that’s the principal one. It has a reputation on the street as being not dangerous, and that’s not true.
Outside of elevated body temperature, what are the symptoms?
They can be having heart attacks, they can be severely dehydrated, they can have convulsions. When you combine that with ongoing, essentially aerobic exercise in a crowd of large numbers of people who are also stoned and not watching out for themselves or other people...
So do you believe why there’s something specific to EDM music and its concerts that makes for higher incidences of these kind of overdoses?
I don’t think the music is to blame. But I do think the venues are to blame. And I’m particularly concerned when local governments — be it at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, or the Coliseum or the Fairplex — lend their venues to these events.
You said in an L.A. Times interview: “The idea of our local government working with the promoters and generating revenue from these events is grotesque.”
I stand by that. I think that’s true.
The L.A. County supervisors are considering a moratorium on EDM festivals on county-owned properties like the fairgrounds in Pomona. Do you think that EDM festivals should be allowed on county property — period?
No, I would ban them. And the Board of Supervisors is concerned about the First Amendment rights of people who want to put these festivals on. I would say that the one legal admonition, the one limit on free speech is: “Don’t yell fire in a theater.” Because you would cause a stampede. I think what [they] are doing is filling the theater and then creating a stampede.
And I think we shouldn’t just count the [attendees] that die — that’s a relatively small number. But we should be looking at the kids who are damaged. Look at the kids who wind up with significant brain damage or loss of kidneys — they don’t make the headlines because they’re not dead.
We reached out to Supervisor Hilda Solis, whose district includes the fairgrounds, but she was unavailable today. She has said that the county is continuing to study whether to continue allowing raves at the fairgrounds.