The FMFA tragedy and police irresponsibility

The revelation that party goers at last year's music festival did not overdose on drugs brings up questions about police intentions.

COMMENT

The past year or so has been pretty difficult for dance music fans. So many festivals were cancelled, so much money was lost and a lot of hope was crushed, sending our country’s reputation as a place to catch great live music spiralling down into an abyss as deep as the one common sense seems to have gone into. And we can trace all this back to that fateful day when the final day of FMFA (Future Music Festival Asia) was cancelled due to six deaths that the police claimed were caused by drug overdose.

Since then, it has seemed almost impossible to have a dance music event without scrutiny from the authorities or complaints from the moral police. The FMFA is no longer held on our shores, and everyone now makes plans to enjoy it in Singapore, Thailand or Indonesia for fear that their hopes will be dashed at the last minute should they purchase tickets to watch the same acts in Malaysia.

With things being the way they are now, finding out that the deaths, or at least three of them, were caused by heatstroke instead of drug overdose must have come as a great relief for the dance music community, but also a cause for outrage. After all, haven’t the authorities and the moral police cited the overdose deaths at FMFA as a major reason for calling off subsequent festivals? The doctor who revealed the cause of death as heatstroke also announced that the party goers who were taken to hospital had lower-than-normal levels of ecstasy and MDMA in their blood.

Now, we’re not discounting that drugs may have contributed to the deaths. After all, the drugs are consumed to enhance the experience, which means more physical activity like dancing, which contributes to the possibility of heatstroke, especially in the conditions in which the festival was held.

However, the police, despite having full knowledge of the cause of death, chose to keep the public in the dark over why these party goers died. And for what? To enforce a narrative that drugs are bad? To give the authorities a reason to cancel music festivals at the blink of an eye? Whatever the reason, it simply does not make sense.

In fact, had the public been informed as to the actual causes of death, music festival organisers in the region could have come up with guidelines to ensure any future event would have an ample water supply and could have given announcements to remind the crowd to stay hydrated to avoid the tragedy from repeating itself. The party goers themselves would be more cognisant of the dangers of not being hydrated, and music events would be safer for that. Instead, all we heard was a parroted “drugs are bad” narrative while the real reason for the deaths was swept under a rug along with any hope we had of enjoying music festivals this year.

If nothing else, the police were irresponsible in not releasing the results of the autopsies and misleading the public into believing that the party goers died of drug overdose. This decision was unfair to the families of the deceased and the organisers, who believed for a better part of a year that it was their negligence in implementing security measures that caused the deaths. Yes, the organisers could have done better, but that does not change the fact that the truth was swept under a rug, seemingly for no good reason.

Hopefully, this will reverse the sad trend of aborting music festivals in Malaysia at the last minute. While there will always be the moral police supplying millions of facetious reasons for any kind of fun event to be cancelled, for better or for worse, the show must go on. The organisers of FMFA and the parents of the deceased must have breathed a sigh of relief to hear the revelation. The guilt must have been haunting them for a year. As for the deceased themselves, we hope they’ll rest a little easier now that their names are no longer connected with the stigma of death by drug overdose.