Yes, very early on people were speculating about drugs, gas leaks, and such. I don't think that is malicious but mostly a lack of understanding about how danger

Yes, very early on people were speculating about drugs, gas leaks, and such. I don't think that is malicious but mostly a lack of understanding about how dangerous crowds can be and what compression asphyxiation is. The drugs could be squarely ruled out even as the very first reports came out. Even in the most hedonistic parties, you couldn't get 50 people to take timed doses of the same substance and have them stay together in the very same location until poisoning set in for a group of people of vastly different body weights at the same time... But if you're talking about a collective response, how about you know... regulating and managing large dangerous crowds like this (I was there last year and it was unsafe then, too...). Or regulating the nightclubs (which are all diabolical death traps, too). They should be blocking off the entire itaewon-ro from noksapyeong to the hooker hill and keeping track of the people entering and leaving and have a protocol for getting first responders in. A nightclub fire would have been equally or even more deadly, the toll could have been in the high hundreds in that event..