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A lot of talk about attendees' use of drugs and alcohol creating risk, but this catastrophe had nothing to do with that.

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Also, you'd think that requiring a commercial flight to a remote island would filter out most of the drugs anyway.

LSD can be stored in liquid form inside of eyedrop sized containers. MDMA and coke are powders which can be stored in a makeup bag without arousing suspicion. Weed can be baked into edibles (brownies, cupcakes, etc) or added to candy (gummies, lollipops). Basically the only thing you need to do is make sure they visually don't look like drugs, since the TSA isn't going to be drug testing everything, they'll just be passing it through an x-ray machine and visually inspecting it.

I'd wager that's not how the bulk of whatever was used there was imported, but I may have seen too many James Bond movies.

What about dogs? Dogs can certainly detect weed in an edible, as well as very small quantities of cocaine and mdma.

Would require ridiculous amounts of dogs, they get bored very fast.

I've heard that most dogs in airports are specifically trained to detect explosives, not marijuana.

Airport security != customs

Still, there's a risk-reward ratio, where the risk is presumably chance of search * chance of detection * penalty for detection.

With a flight the chance of search is 100% - and the TSA are famously tough on innocent people, so I can't imagine they're easy on guilty people.

One would think the increased risk would at least raise prices, if not limit the supply.

Ha, I personally would not think that but fair enough.

I was simply pointing out that if it's soo hard and expensive to insure a festival because people do drugs, what has Fyre festival got to do with that? It was a disaster because the organizers didn't do their jobs.

Since there are drugs in US prisons, probably nothing stops people from getting them into a remote island.

I would assume the opposite because of the cash available to the attendees and someone probably flew private. This is a rich clientele with a desire to party. Someone would figure the logistics of supplying them.

Neither is the article claiming it had? Despite the headline, it really is primarily talking about festival insurance in general.

1. Festivals are hard to insure because the attendees get wasted, then they hurt themselves and do dumb stuff. (OK)

2. Fyre festival was a huge disaster because the people who put it together did a bad job, and not really for any reasons regarding attendees at all. (Also OK)

3. Therefore, Fyre festival has "ruined it" for other festivals -- i.e., made it harder for them to get insurance. (???? This doesn't follow from 1 & 2)

"Inevitably, there will be claims, with spectator liability being the most common, said Nuccio. “Most of them are liability claims: slip and fall, molestation, alleged rape, false arrest, false imprisonment, assault, battery.” "

These cases often involve drugs or alcohol.

I don't understand - how could assault or rape be the responsibility of the event organiser? If people are being dicks they should be paying for it, not the event's insurance.

From the article:

> In late June, Insomniac Holdings LLC and Live Nation Entertainment Inc. were sued for the wrongful death of attendee Tom Nicholas at the Electric Daisy Carnival festival in Las Vegas, alleging the event made it difficult to access water and medical staff. In 2016, the mother of Emily Michelle Tran, who died at the HARD Summer Festival in 2014 after taking MDMA and having a seizure, sued Live Nation for negligence and wrongful death. Insomniac and Live Nation declined to comment on the litigation.

The key there was the difficulty accessing staff. For assault and rape, the organizer could be at fault if there was insufficient security staff, or the hired staff ignored an issue allowing for negligence. Furthermore, if the security ignored an individual who was drunk and belligerent leading to an assault or rape, that would also be an issue. With the prevalence of drinking at such events and security missing or overlooking such an event, this is a very real concern for insurers.

There's a large body of law in the U.S. on the responsibilities of "dramshops" (places that sell alcohol) and social hosts.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/alcohol-related-accid... is a good place to start your research.

If something bad happens to you at a festival, why would you sue the festival? In the words of Willie Sutton (who was talking about robbing banks) "That's where the money is."

I think it's purely an English law thing (?) but have you heard of Vicarious Liability, it's kinda crazy what a company can be liable for.

Yes, that was the general argument for why it's hard/expensive to insure a festival. But all the problems with Fyre festival were the fault of those who organized it. (Or didn't organize it, I guess.)

And the insurers saw how wrong it can go and how much the payouts for such could be. This then was fed back into the risk / premium calculation equations and have kicked out a new, higher number for festivals that lack a history (and even those that do have a history, as the risk has gone up too). Furthermore, as insurers tend to spread the cost around (the festivals with a good history, and the festivals with little or no history), the festivals with a good history will pick up a bit of additional cost for insurance to make sure that insurers have enough to be able to cover possible losses.

There's the other side to the coin too. Now, a bunch of con men saw how easy it is to swindle a bunch of idiots for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and even get them to fly to a remote island before making away with the money. This will attract some bad characters and that's why it's time to ship out a piece like this. It's a hit piece to highlight the punishment and tightening controls to keep the con men at bay from trying the same thing. Smart.

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