Four Californians aged 18 to 24 have died at music festivals in the last 15 months. The latest victims were two young women attending the two-day Hard Summer Music Festival held this past weekend at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, CA.
The two girls, Tracy Nguyen, 18, and Katie Dix, 19, died from apparent drug overdoses. Autopsies on both women are pending, according to the coroner’s office. They are the most recent young people in at least 18 deaths at raves throughout the country in the last few years.
A 19-year-old woman died last year after attending the same music festival in Whittier Narrows. The cause of her death is also suspected to be an alcohol or drug overdose.
It has been confirmed that the 24-year-old San Francisco man who died while attending the Electric Daisy Carnival rave in Las Vegas six weeks ago had ingested a fatal dose of the drug Ecstasy. The cause of death for Nicholas Austin Tom, a UC Irvine graduate, was MDMA intoxication, the shortened version of Ecstasy’s scientific name, according to the Clark County coroner’s office. Tom was declared dead June 21, 2015, at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where the rave was being held.
Raves are one of the most popular venues where club drugs are distributed. Club drugs include the hallucinogen MDMA, GHB and Rohypnol (also known as the “date rape” drugs), Ketamine, methamphetamine (meth) and LSD. Because some club drugs are colorless, odorless and tasteless, they can be added to beverages without detection.
Hard Events is owned by Live Nation, which also owns Insomniac Events, the company that organizes the Electric Daisy Carnival.