Sasha Rodriguez

Sasha Rodriguez (1994 - June 29, 2010) was a 15-year-old American teenager from Los Angeles who died after taking MDMA (otherwise known as ecstasy) while attending an Electric Daisy Carnival in 2010. Rodriguez attended the rave festival with another female friend, was dancing strenuously, became hot and drank an unknown amount of water before passing out. She was transferred directly from the rave to the California Hospital Medical Center in respiratory arrest and did not recover.
Incident
On June 29, 2010, Sasha Rodriguez attended the Electric Daisy Carnival, in Los Angeles, California, an international annual electronic dance festival at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Rodriguez attended the event with a 16-year-old female friend and the two allegedly ingested ecstasy after entering the festival. The event, which had a relatively large capacity, was considerably crowded and Rodriguez had been dancing for a significant period of time after ingesting the MDMA tablet. She began feeling hot, drank cold water, and soon after collapsed. After her death and autopsy, doctors stated that "her sodium, electrolytes were so low that when she started replacing them so quickly , ecstasy messes up your body's ability to process that, so it threw her body out of whack". Rodriguez hit her head on the ground, and an ambulance was called, which transferred her directly to California Hospital Medical Centre. Rodriguez was in respiratory arrest and did not recover. She died shortly before 5:30pm.
Aftermath
The California event, held in Los Angeles, drew significant criticism from local authorities and promoters alike after numerous people were taken to the hospital by paramedics, including Rodriguez, who did not survive. The city of Los Angeles began to consider banning all raves from being held in the city. The Coliseum Commission meeting on July 16, 2010, dropped its moratorium on all remaining events scheduled for 2010 and kept a moratorium on booking any future events, pending the outcome of the use of new security and safety provisions. Those new provisions include a minimum age of 18 on all future events and the presence of on-site doctors. This EDC had one of the highest attendance, up to 185,000 people.
Rodriguez was not the first death attributed to ecstasy and excessive water consumption in the United States or internationally. In 1995, an Australian school girl died in similar circumstances, while a British schoolgirl died a month later in almost an identical manner. The drug ecstasy is known to impair water secretion, in a condition known as SIADH, and can eventually cause water intoxication and other complications.
In 2001, 16-year-old Brittney Chambers died in almost identical circumstances in Boulder, Colorado after ingesting an ecstasy tablet. Chambers collapsed into a coma and died in hospital six days later. A coroner ruled her death as swelling of the brain caused by drinking large quantities of water (cerebral edema) which diluted her blood. Chambers' ingestion of MDMA lead to her drinking large quantities of water resulting in hyponatremia (low salt) and the fatal swelling of her brain.

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