Will it take a death to end Floatopia? As a 30-year veteran of full-time emergency medicine practice in San Diego, I am well aware of the dangers of mixing alcohol, the beaches and water. I have taken care of a number of alcohol overdose fatalities in my medical career and you are asking for trouble when you allow a public event to take place whose sole purpose is to get as many people as drunk as possible. As usual, we will probably have to wait for some extremely bad publicity for the City Council to take action. Unfortunately, in this situation, the bad publicity will likely be a death (and then some grieving relatives will probably sue the city for not having done something to prevent it). – James M. Larson, MD FACEP, Pacific Beach