GRANT PARK — The number of teenagers hospitalized for drinking during Lollapalooza weekend continued to creep upward this year, according to doctors and representatives of Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital.
The 16 boys and 17 girls that received emergency treatment at Lurie this past weekend — "almost all of them alcohol-related," according to spokeswoman Julie Pesch — is up slightly from 31 teens in 2014.
The festival saw 85 ambulance visits on its first day alone, according to ABC News.
Last year, according to data released last week by Lurie, 102 total youths were hospitalized for alcohol abuse across the city. The Chicago Fire Department and Office of Emergency Management and Communications could not provide information on this year's citywide total.
Even with extra staff working, Lurie emergency room physician Dr. Walter Eppich said Lolla weekend is consistently one his busiest times of year.
"These are patients who need immediate attention, since they're usually unconscious and vomiting," Eppich said. "You can't just put them in the waiting room."
"It got pretty hectic at times," he added. Some of his patients, he said, had a blood alcohol level three times the legal driving limit, which is "very dangerous for teens."
Alex Nitkin says the hospitalizations stem from a citywide problem:
While some are calling on the festival's organizers to crack down on underage drinking, Eppich said a heavier burden of responsibility falls on parents.
"In the venue, they seem fairly well regulated — they can't buy alcohol there," Eppich said. "The problem starts before they get there. They drink too much, and they way overdo it."
Officials representing Lollapalooza could not be reached for comment.
According to Lurie's data, more than twice as many teens were hospitalized for alcohol on Lolla weekend than any on any other weekend of 2014. The reasons for that aren't yet clear, according to Lurie researcher Rebecca Levin.
"Looking at this data, we don't know if [increases in teen hospitalizations] are because Lolla is just the biggest festival in town, or because it's getting more popular among kids, or what," Levin said. "We have to put it in context, and part of that is realizing that we get tons of alcohol-related incidents all throughout the year, from all parts of the city."
Levin said the Lolla hospitalizations stem from an endemic citywide problem, and local researchers are trying to find out more about it.
This year, she said, the Illinois Department of Human Services launched a coalition to investigate and address underage drinking in Chicago. The program will bring to the table community organizations, the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Liquor Control commissioner and others, she said.
"We're just now starting to dive into all this big-picture data, so we want to use it to get a better sense of this problem and how to deal with it," Levin said. "We've come a long way since the 'Just Say No' days of when I was growing up...and we need to keep evolving on how we talk to teens about this, so we don't keep repeating what happened this weekend."
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