“I had a gut feeling that this was not right.”
There are idiotic conspiracy theories being circulated about the Astroworld disaster in Houston. They are pure bullshit.
No, there is not any evidence that somebody was running around injecting people with a syringe.
[T]he needle-prick story should never have been reported as news. In addition to a lack of evidence—there was no toxicology report verifying the claim—it just doesn’t make basic sense. I’ve been a journalist on the drug beat for several years, and I’ve never talked to a drug user who’s eager to give their drugs away for free to people who don’t want it. It also takes time and concentration to dilute drugs and load them in a syringe, a task that could be quite difficult to do in a dark and crowded space like Astroworld. Then, there’s the matter of actually injecting a moving target square in the neck, unless maybe the assailant is Showtime’s Dexter. In reality, it’s incredibly difficult to inject someone in the neck, especially “stealthily,” said Dr. Ryan Marino, who specializes in addiction and overdose.
And the Satanic influence story sounds like a Christian fundamentalist fever dream which recurs whenever some music crops up which far right religious fanatics really don’t like.
It’s understandable to reach for a clear cause and source of blame in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy; on TikTok, conspiracy theorists suggested that the concert was some kind of satanic ritual led by Scott.
Blaming problems on people who are allegedly in thrall to Satan is part of the playbook of loony Christian fanatics.
In fact, nine people were killed because of poor planning, poor security, and poor crowd control.
Live Nation, the organizer, and Travis Scott both look irresponsible. The performance continued over half an hour after officials declared a mass casualty event.
That itself is so wrong. But what is worse is that there were simply too many people crowded together in too small a space without proper crowd management.
Crowd crush, otherwise known as “crowd surge,” is a horrifying phenomenon that occurs when people are jammed so tight together that they can’t breathe, leading to injury and possible death by compressive asphyxia. In crowd crush, people don’t need to be in an altered state of mind to trample other people to death (not that drugs cause one to do that, anyway). It’s happened before: A gruesome case of crowd crush at Hillsborough stadium in 1989 killed 97 people. “Crowd crush is not a very intuitive thing,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “When I started paramedic school, I didn’t understand how trampling was deadly. But it’s completely plausible that young, perfectly healthy people could die from it.”
Crowd crush is nothing new, nobody can say this was totally unforeseen. It is a phenomenon which has been well known for at least 2,200 years.
At the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), the Carthaginian general Hannibal encircled most of a Roman army and kept advancing until the Romans were so compressed that many were asphyxiated. (Though ironically, many of those encircled Romans tried to commit suicide by asphyxiation.)
Just to illustrate: A scene from S06E09 of Game of Thrones was directly inspired by Cannae.
If Sansa and Littlefinger hadn't come to the rescue, Jon Snow and his allies would have ended up like those Romans at Cannae.
Astroworld was clearly a preventable tragedy. Profit was placed above safety.
If event organizers refuse to manage crowds in a safe way, states and municipalities should establish mandatory crowd control standards for any large event. A concert should not end up looking like an ancient battle.
