The recently concluded Electric Zoo Festival was one of the biggest events for dance music fans on the East Coast. The festival had the likes of Avicii, Alesso, Above and Beyond, Hardwell and Zedd amongst many others who brought on a brilliant show for everyone.

Unfortunately, instead of looking back and reflecting upon all the great moments of the festival, everyone connected with dance music has just one thing on his or her mind – “What might have been?”

A Syracuse university graduate (Jeffrey Russ) and a Rhode Island junior (Olivia Rotondo) died after having an overdose of the MDMA drug (popularly knows as MOLLY or ecstasy pills) at the festival.

To make things even worse, at least four people were also hospitalized in critical condition after apparent drug overdoses.

By the end of Day 2 of the festival, all these events had occurred and this prompted the city officials to shut down the festival and cancel it’s final day.

“I just took six hits of Molly” were apparently the last words of Olivia to an emergency services worker on Saturday before suddenly collapsing in a seizure and dying.

Now there are two ways of looking at this entire episode –

The first one would be to blame the festival organizers on how could they shut down an entire day because of an immature decision taken by two attendees. The average ticket for the festival was about $180 (approx 12K Indian Rupees) and people had travelled from many different cities to attend the event.

(Fans vent their anger on Electric Zoo’s Official Facebook Page)

The second one would perhaps revolve around the “better be safe than sorry” philosophy. By cancelling the entire day, the festival organizers didn’t want to risk another life at all. Although, Made Event (the festival organizers) did their bit by making several announcements asking attendees to stay hydrated, the incidents still ended up taking place.

(Artists like Sebastian Ingrosso and A-Trak were one of the first ones to react from the music scene)

Now there will always be a divided opinion on both these points but I guess the bigger picture lies in how best we end up answering the following questions –

-How much can a festival organizer do in his/her power to control the use of drugs?

-Are we as dance music fans too naïve to even accept that drugs like “molly” are not being consumed at music festivals?

-How much of a role do our favorite DJ’s need to play in educating people against the use of drugs?

(Time for someone to stand up and do something)

Here is my take on this – Firstly, it is absolutely wrong to categorize the entire dance music fraternity as one where they only do drugs and incidents like the one at Electric Zoo were “bound to happen”.  Yes, there is no denying the fact that most festivals will have some section of the crowd doing such things but this is a choice that they have decided to take.

Spoiling the image of the genre or ridiculing the concept of music festivals is absolutely unfair.  Having said that, it is also time for all of us to do something before all of this negativity ends up consuming the thing we all love the most.

Festival organizers and even DJ’s need to take up the initiative of heavily promoting organizations like Dance Safe (http://www.dancesafe.org/). These organizations do a fantastic job of educating festival attendees on the ill effects of consuming drugs.

Finally, having our favorite artists DJ’s and artists participate in campaigns against the use of drugs in any form can tremendously inspire the young generation to not follow this path.

(Artists like Kaskade, A-Trak and Steve Aoki take it upon themselves to educate the fans in the video above)

The road ahead is tough but let’s not forget that if there is one thing that can bring us together then that is…music.

Our team at Bangin Beats would like to give out our thoughts to the family and friends of those who passed away at Electric Zoo 2013.