Music
Canadian music festival deaths prompt new safety guidelines
by Richard Howard
June 29, 2015
Last summer between June and August, five deaths attributed to alcohol and/or ingestion of drugs occurred at Canadian music festivals. That’s pretty messed up – so much so that the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse has developed and released a report of safety recommendations titled Preventing Drug- and Alcohol-related Harms at Music Festivals in Canada. Centre researcher Matthew Young sad that they worked with police, public health officials and music festival experts “to make sure that if [festival goers] get into that trouble they can get out of that trouble.”
The cool thing about the report is that it wasn’t the same old ‘educate kids about drugs and beef up security.’ That’s in there, as it should be, but the fact is kids know about drugs – more so than anyone short of chemistry majors and health professionals -and if they so desire are still going to do them. And like it or not, drugs are going to get snuck in. Thankfully, the report faces this reality head on and gets into how to effectively deal with it and prevent deaths. Recommendations include event organisers developing a strong relationship with local emergency services, the provision of safe physical spaces (‘chill spaces’) which can prevent escalation of a bad trip and a number of considerations to achieve optimal medical response at festivals including having physicians and even specialists on site rather than only paramedics. They also suggested small ‘fringe’ response teams that would serve the parking lots and immediate surroundings.
Though it should be glaringly obvious, one of the most righteous inclusions was the need for festivals to provide reliable access to free drinkable water. It is absolute bullshit that they aren’t required to – in fact it should be illegal, and since they serve alcohol it very well might be. FTW though – suggesting ‘peer volunteers’ to patrol the crowd. “Sometimes you don’t necessarily want to go to a police officer or a paramedic, so maybe having a volunteer who’s one of your peers will help you with a comfort level as well,” said Ali Shafee whose events company will be incorporating the practice. In short – when you’re tripping balls, you’re not going to go to a cop and hope he doesn’t narc you out.
