FORMER IRELAND’S GOT Talent contestant Brandon Webb, who was put into an induced coma after he took MDMA at Electric Picnic last year, is called on festival-goers not to experiment with drugs.
Speaking to RTÉ Radio One’s Today with Miriam, the 20-year-old said he promised his mother he wouldn’t take drugs at the festival after she gave him the “drug talk”.
“I’ve never touched drugs before. I wasn’t even a big drinker at the time,” Webb said.
However, he went on to say that his “guard just came down” on the final night of the festival and he decided to experiment.
“This little crystal was handed to me,” he said.
About an hour or two later I just said go on sure I’ll take it, it’s the last day. I took it and I paid the price for it.
Webb said he sat down on a chair and within 15 minutes he “didn’t feel right”.
“As I was sitting in the chair I started having a mini stroke on my left hand side, my whole left side was gone. I actually stood up and I just collapsed and my heart stopped there and then,” he said.
Webb said he was lucky that a girl he knew was present and gave him CPR.
He was then taken to Naas hospital “where things just went from bad to worse”.
“There was… more than 300 seizures in the space of an hour, two hours, obviously my mam and dad and that were called and they came in,” he said.
“My mum said to me, ‘I was standing looking at you with the nurse and we thought your heart was going to come out through your skin, it was beating that fiercely’,” Webb recalls.
Because he had so many seizures, the doctors decided to put Webb into an induced coma.
He was put into the coma on the Monday morning and doctors woke him up on the Tuesday night. He said he had another seizure immediately and he was put under again.
“That is when they said, ‘right this isn’t good, so everyone was preparing to say goodbye to me’,” Webb said.
“Then I woke up on the Friday and all that was wrong was a collapsed lung,” he said.
Webb has called on festival-goers not to experiment with drugs this weekend.
“If … me talking about it saves one life this weekend, saves one person from thinking about taking [drugs] and they’re like ‘Well I saw that picture of that young lad who actually survived so I’m not going to take it’, that’s enough for me,” he said.
Drug seizures
Between today and Sunday, nearly 60,000 festival-goers are set to head to this year’s Electric Picnic.
Yesterday, the gates for the festival opened at 4pm and gardaí said a number of seizures of illegal drugs were made “within minutes”.
The drugs seized included cocaine, ketamine, LSD and MDMA.
Gardaí have said they will continue to carry out searches over the weekend and are reminding people attending that “any seizures made will have consequences for the individual”.
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