LA Docs Demand End to Raves

More than 120 young people ended up in local hospitals after a recent mega-rave at the Los Angeles Coliseum, spurring emergency room doctors to call for a ban on such events at the publicly owned facility. "This is basically a government-encouraged drug fest. That’s the wrong message,” the director of the emergency room at White Memorial Medical Center tells the Los Angeles Times. “It’s putting people at risk unnecessarily. It’s putting people’s health at risk.”

Officials have to plan for Coliseum raves the same way they do for other "multi-casualty incidents" like train crashes, says the director of the county emergency medical services agency. The Coliseum's director, however, insists managers are already doing all they can to clamp down on drug use. "Are we happy that there’s drugs? No. But on the other hand, we take every step we can to minimize it,” he explained. “There’s a reason 185,000 people were here. They’re quality events. My kids came and had a ball.” (More Los Angeles stories.)