Did anybody attend? It was probably the greatest weekend of my life.
Anyways, I thought it was interesting that for all the police that Nevada and Las Vegas deployed to the LV Speedway, they seemed to have done absolutely nothing. They certainly did not impact the sheer volume of drugs that were smuggled into the event (not that the private security hired by Insomniac, the event holders, were particularly concerned with finding peoples’ drugs [one guy told me he had smuggled in pills in his hair] – I think that confiscating the ecstacy people smuggle into EDC would kill the event). And once inside the event I didn’t see them do anything useful; I mean, you could smell the marijuana in the air, and people were using other drugs pretty openly.
Something else that libertarians might cheer is the fact that the ambulance service between the speedway and the hospitals was private and hired by Insomniac, and I’m pretty sure the same is true of the first-aid crew. Not only that, but in Las Vegas there were no deaths amongst the average of 80,000 individuals who attended EDC each night (I thought it was higher – around 200,000 --, but I guess I was wrong), and most injuries were due to dehydration (which were relatively few, due to the great service provided by the Insomniac crew in making sure everybody had plenty of water [you had to pay for the bottle, but refilling it was free]).
The only thing that I saw the police really do was “direct” traffic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to make the traffic worse than it would have otherwise been (although, maybe this should be considered some type of subsidy, if Insomniac would have had to direct traffic instead).