We’re still trying to piece our brains back together after they were melted at the mention of how many nitrous oxide canisters, (commonly known as nangs), were found at Glastonbury in 2014, and now more stats have emerged about drug and alcohol consumption at major music festivals.
An interesting study taken by DrugAbuse.com (via Billboard) compiled a whole lot of statistics to find out what the three most popular drugs were taken in 15 of the most popular music festivals around the globe, which provided both some pretty obvious results, as well as some rather startling factoids.
The basic process taken by DrugAbuse was to first scan Instagram to see how many posts mentioned one of the 15 festivals they were analysing – a staggering 3,622,365, and from there, they looked at how many of the posts mentioned or alluded to a the consumption of alcohol or drugs, providing them with their final results.
[include_post id=”432582″]
Surprisingly (or not) Marley Fest, the Austin reggae music festival, had the highest percentage of drug-taking, and even more (not) shocking saw that a large cocktail of drugs were consumed at the one and only Burning Man and that Coachella is in fact Cokechella, however the highest consumed substance was alcohol at the Chilli Cook-Off, you gotta wash them spices down with something though, right?
Outside of booze and pot, MDMA and cocaine appear to be the most popular consumed drugs at festivals across the globe, however what we’ve found the most surprising in all of this is that there’s seriously that many people that publicly broadcast their drug-taking at music festivals. We sure as hell wouldn’t want our bosses see us proudly posting on Instagram that we flying high on LSD at Burning Man, but hey, each to their own.
Of course, these figures are not 100 percent accurate, the researchers having taken a fresh approach via Instagram and “word of mouth” to collect their data.
Take a look at the graph below:
