With Australia’s first pill-testing trial heralded a wild success, it’s time to change our tune towards drugs at festivals.
Australia’s first pill-testing trial took place at Groovin The Moo in Canberra over the weekend, with potentially game-changing results.
Festival goers in the ACT were able to take their pills and substances to a small testing tent for either a full sample or a scraping, getting a rundown of exactly what they had spent their money on. Surprisingly (or not, depending on how familiar you are with pressed pills), 50% were not actually MDMA. Instead, researchers identified ingredients like lactose, paint and even a brand of Polish toothpaste, as well as two potentially deadly substances. One of these was N-Ethylpentylone, a stimulant which has been known to cause mass overdoses and hasn’t been found in Australia before.
Matt Noffs, a vocal activist for pill testing, took to Twitter on Monday to provide a summary of the research team’s findings, adding his own little cheer of success: “So, harm reduced. We did it.”
Here is Australia’s first official #pilltesting service in numbers:
128 participants
85 samples tested
50% was ‘other’ (lactose, sweetener, paint)
50% was pure MDMA
2 of the samples were deadly
So, harm reduced.
We did it.— Matt Noffs (@mattnoffs) April 29, 2018
It’s a victory that is long overdue.
The debate over pill testing in Australia has been around for years now, with mixed opinions from policymakers, drug users and communities. A lot of people are under the impression that introducing pill-testing to festivals would normalise drug taking and encourage youth to participate in it, but the evidence says otherwise.
Festival drug testing is already standard practice in 20 countries across Europe, the Americas and New Zealand. It has been proven to both save lives and minimise potential harm to attendees. In the Netherlands, pill-testing is part of official harm reduction policies, while Austria has a program called ChEck iT! (similar to the one rolled out at Groovin) that operates with support from local police. Then there’s Portugal, who decriminalised drug use altogether in 2001 and decided to treat the issue as a health problem, resulting in a massive decline in drug-related deaths.
These countries have found that drug regulation not only prevents people from ingesting potentially harmful substances, but also means they’re better informed about the risks associated with taking them, and are less likely to do so.
If the Groovin The Moo trial is anything to go by, it’s safe to assume a lot of Aussie festival-goers weren’t expecting to be sold – at best, duds and at worse, lethal substances – when buying MDMA. When people were told what was actually in the gear they planned on taking they were put off, with the STA-SAFE team reporting that five participants chucked away their drugs, and another quarter to a third said they’d probably do the same.
Of course there could be a few improvements to the facility, which should be enacted if Australia wants to get serious about harm reduction. Festival-goers commented on how hard the tent was to find (it wasn’t included on the sitemap), suggesting that signs are put up or the location be changed to somewhere more accessible. There were also punters saying they felt too scared to use the service because they didn’t want to get busted by police.
Albeit, the ACT police force had agreed that they wouldn’t be patrolling that area, and were focusing on dealers instead. Teething problems like this are to be expected – it was an experiment after all. The point is that now we know it works, and there are ways to make it even better.
Now that the trial is over, it’s time to talk about where we go from here. Politicians like Liberal backbencher Warren Entsch and Labor senator Lisa Singh are vocalising their support for more pill-testing at festivals, and the ACT government and police force are likely to be celebrating their risk paying off. The hope is that other state governments will get on board and implement the same service at festivals across the country, providing attendees with an important health and safety service to which they are entitled.
If @CraigKellyMP supports the Portuguese model for harm minimization then he acknowledges drug taking exists. It then doesn’t make sense for him to be against pill testing at music festivals. @RadioNational @tomiggulden
— Lisa Singh (@Lisa_Singh) April 29, 2018
People who want to take drugs are going to, regardless of whether it’s safe or unsafe, legal or illegal. It’s unrealistic to think that drug use is something we can eradicate completely. But what we can do – and what policymakers should be doing – is give people who want to take drugs the opportunity to do so safely. Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.
There have been too many deaths from dodgy pills to keep sticking our heads in the sand. If Australia is serious about protecting young people and festivalgoers, we need systems in place that can see pill testing rolled out across major festivals across the county. Groovin the Moo is just the start of what could be a lifesaving initiative, making our future festivals safer, smarter and more enjoyable for all.
