Consider Olivia Rotondo, whose by-all-accounts-normal life suggests that her death could have happened to anyone. Four hours after tweeting her excitement about the Electric Zoo Festival on New York City’s Randall’s Island, she collapsed in front of a paramedic, saying the seven words that in the weeks since have become a macabre Exhibit A in the campaign against the drug that is said to have killed her.

“I just took six hits of Molly.”

She died that night. Jeffrey Russ, a 23-year old also believed to have taken MDMA (the drug’s proper name) had passed away 18 hours earlier. The following day—what would have been the grand finale to the three-day gyration of 100,000 neon-clad ravers—Randall’s Island was deserted and silent.

Since it first plugged in its equipment five summers ago, Electric Zoo has marked the end of the annual electronic festival season in the United States, the centerpiece each year of one of the country’s most mainstream and lucrative new artistic industries. In 2012, electronic dance music (EDM) spawned eleven platinum hits and increased the population of Miami by one quarter for one of the biggest American musical events since Woodstock. It has repackaged and commoditized the two-decade-old EDM mantra of “Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect” (usually abbreviated to “PLUR”) that apparently captures what this whole vision, with its bass drops and Day-Glo campiness, and a certain synthetic chemical stimulant, has always been about.

It’s too soon to tell how the Electric Zoo tragedies will influence the cachet of either the music or MDMA use in America, though many believe they go hand-in-hand, to such an extent that it’s hard to determine exactly which came first.

“If you look at electronic dance music culture, it seems to be more diverse, more accepting of the 'other', more welcoming of gay people—a counter-ethos of ‘we’re in it together,’” Dr. Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), told me. “There’s a spiritual aspect to it. For many, the drug serves that function. There’s something fundamentally wholesome about these communal dance parties.”

It’s not hard to understand why. “Rolling,” as the new ravers call the high, is a state of prolonged euphoria, intimacy, and kinesis: the conditions encouraged by a pulsing beat, a rococo of colored lights, and a setting that makes rubbing up against dozens of people tough to avoid. The drug makes the music better, and vice-versa. In spite of efforts to commercialize the scene, or perhaps because of them, this truism remains the genre’s core.

But what happens when an ethos built around a drug collapses, yet people keep getting high? Think about the Summer of Love of 1967, when the LSD utopia of San Francisco devolved into a haven for crime and drug abuse. Think about Altamont, where the chemicals that enabled a generation’s divine visions later inflamed the violence that left Meredith Hunter dead. We've felt the quakes of this same force in the mainstreaming of EDM in the last half-decade, where lyrics about the indestructibility of love, the clarity of the horizon, and the remedy of the bass have given way to Miley Cyrus’s braying electronic anthems about “dancing with Molly.” Themes of transcendent universal harmony have dissipated into bitter Tweets about how Olivia Rotondo and Jeffrey Russ ruined EZoo for everyone else. This force hasn't knocked the revolution off its axis, per se—it has simply made the axis illegible.