42 People Were Arrested At The Atlantic City Phish Concerts And You’ll Never Guess Why

Last week, the beloved American jam band Phish closed out its brief fall tour with three shows at the Atlantic City Boardwalk Hall, which isn’t necessarily noteworthy unless it made you snap out of a two-week haze and say, “Whoa man, did I miss the Halloween show?” What is noteworthy is that as many as 42 Phish fans were arrested during the three shows that took place on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, as someone in the Atlantic City Police Department’s Special Investigations Section was smart enough to say, “You know what? I think there might be people using drugs at one of these Phish concerts.”

The results of the arrests read like a grocery list for a college surf team’s graduation celebration.

Drugs also were recovered. They include hashish, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD in paper blotters and sugar cubes, prescription pills, bath salts, 51 nitrous oxide tanks and marijuana in several forms, including cookies and brownies.

Two of the arrests, both women from Brooklyn, were for prostitution charges. (Via the Press of Atlantic City)

I don’t mean to sound like a guy who might know what he’s talking about, but I can’t imagine those hookers were getting too much business from the people taking all of those drugs. You know, unless guys were looking to pay $20 to drool all over themselves and piss their pants while the girls stripped, in which case they might have done well.

Also of note is the new song, “The Line,” that Phish debuted at the Halloween show. The song was written about Memphis Tigers basketball player Darius Washington, who, in 2005, missed two out of three free throws that would have sent his team to the NCAA Tournament, but instead left his team without a ticket to the dance. Of course, Trey Anastasio got some of the details wrong when he explained it (or he was thinking of someone else), but a guy who has been exposed to that much pot smoke during his career gets a break.

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