Surprise, surprise. What’s really tragic is that this is happening a year after the last Defqon 1 in Sydney, that also saw several drug related arrests along with a tragic death.
There has been this ongoing debate about whether or not sniffer dogs (used by cops to sniff out drug dealers and users at fests) should be banned as the fear of their presence make certain festival-goers ingest their drugs all at once.
An observation made by Australian band Art Vs Science on their Facebook page raises an interesting, but debatable, point. It says,
” Presence of dogs at festival grounds induces panic amongst festival goers, who in turn – ‘panic’ overdose on the substances that if, taken in minimal quantities – is rarely harmful and simply escalates their musical experience.”
However this plea turned out to fall on deaf ears.
In fact, more than double the amount of police were present at the aussie electronic music fest, along with their dog squad which resulted in 83 people being arrested and 7 being hospitalized.
The numbers on how many searches took place are a bit overwhelming – 372 people were searched and 7 people arrested on basis of being drug suppliers at the festival. It was said that one person had around 250 pills of MDMA on him.
Simply put, we’re just happy no one was seriously hurt. We at Festival Sherpa have time and again asserted our rather unpopular opinion, that the source of drug abuse is drug abuse. Not the presence of sniffer dogs, or cameras or whatever other excuses people have to come up with to make it seem like it is okay to purposely overdose. The hard truth? People at this at large scale music fests refuse to learn from previous experiences, and that is the issue that needs dealing with.