[The Times] | Music festivals are ‘putting profit above safety’

The British music festival industry is at a “pre-Hillsborough moment” with urgent steps needed to eliminate drug deaths and improve welfare provision and crowd control, a leading criminologist has warned.

Two people died during the Mutiny Festival in Portsmouth last weekend, as organisers warned that a “bad batch” of drugs had circulated on site. Fiona Measham, a criminology professor at Durham University, attends ten festivals per year with The Loop, a charity that allows fans to test the safety of their drugs. She said some festivals still do not want to acknowledge that they have a drug problem. [Read more]