Last weekend at Insomniac’s Beyond Wonderland show, a 22 year-old man suffered a seizure and passed away. It’s a tragedy, and one for which our whole community grieves. Our hearts and thoughts are with John Hoang Dinh Vo’s family and friends in this difficult time, and we wish more than anything that calamities like this would just…stop.
Unfortunately, that’s not really a realistic dream.
When tens of thousands of people are gathered in a relatively small environment, disaster sometimes strikes. This is awful, but sadly, nothing new. For decades, concerts of all kinds resulted in the hospitalizations and deaths of numerous attendees, with the cause of these accidents ranging from structural mishaps to horrific overdoses.
But now these deaths are becoming knee-jerk, uninformed tools of propaganda. Anti-drug, pro-drug, anti/pro festival, it doesn’t matter—when the loss of a human life is used to further an agenda, that’s unacceptable. We, as a society, are better than that. Human life is to be respected and cherished, not sensationalized.
The toxicology reports are not even back yet, and you’ll be hard pressed to even find an article that doesn’t present the tragedy with a ‘molly’ angle of some kind. When the results are in, fine, we can have that discussion. Hell, it’s a discussion we need to have. But not without the facts, and not with the intent of capitalizing on suffering to get easy page views. Let’s show him and his family a little respect and give them time to grieve first.
Please, be safe. Watch out for others around you. Ultra Music Festival is going on right now, and it would be heartbreaking to have another accident. Life is precious, celebrate and cherish it, and keep those we’ve lost in your soul as you dance into the night.
Important things happen in Pacific Northwest nightlife, and DMNW will send you alerts!
