Two Die at Electric Zoo Festival, Sunday Date Cancelled
The third day of the Electric Zoo Festival has been canceled due to “serious health risks,” a statement from the New York City government announced and a posting from the festival confirmed.
The release on nyc.gov states that two fans had died and at least four became “critically ill” during the first two days of the festival, and while “definitive causes of death have not yet been determined, both appear to have involved the drug MDMA (ecstasy, or molly).”
“The founders of Electric Zoo send our deepest condolences to the families of the two people who passed away this weekend,” read a statement on promoter Made Event’s website, posted around 10:15 this morning. “Because there is nothing more important to us than our patrons, we have decided in consultation with the New York City Parks Department that there will be no show today.” According to attorney Ed McPherson of McPherson Rane LLP, who represented rock band Great White in litigation over the fatal Station nightclub fire in 2003, Made made the right move.
Electric Zoo Festival Photos
“Electric Zoo organizers have done absolutely the right thing after the fatalities occurred - and that is to close the festival,” he said. “Of course, that is a huge disappointment for everyone, and potentially a great expense for the promoters. However, if one life is saved because someone had to go home, where (hopefully) that culture does not exist, and they can make certain that nobody uses whatever drugs they have, it is obviously well worth the disappointment and expense.” The cancellation makes Electric Zoo the first major festival of the three-year-old EDM boom to be shuttered due to drug concerns, and it comes at a particularly bad time for the industry. Its greatest test thus far, the initial public offering (IPO) of Robert F.X. Sillerman’s revived SFX Entertainment - a multi-million-dollar rollup of EDM promoters and other entities - is scheduled for the coming weeks, and trades heavily on investor’s confidence in the genre’s stability and growth potential. Made Event was listed as a “planned” acquisition in SFX’s IPO prospectus released in late June, valued at $25 million in cash and stock for 70% of the company. It’s unclear whether that deal has yet closed.
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