Our Vision: To support and educate young people, their families and communities to prevent the damage caused by drugs
Superior Plan to Save Lives at Music Festivals
Drug Free Australia is proposing to State and Territory Parliamentarians nationwide a superior prevention plan to save lives at music festivals which avoids the significant pitfalls presented by pill testing’s harm reduction framework.
Harm Reduction has not worked for Australia. Introduced in 1985 as the central plank of its illicit drug policy, ‘world-leading’ harm reduction interventions such as needle & syringe programs and opiate maintenance were associated with Australia becoming the most drug-abusing country in the developed world by 1998 (see p 11) and with exponentially increasing drug-related fatalities peaking in 1999 with 1116 opiate deaths. Pragmatically wed to the notion of making drug use safer while not necessarily reducing use, Harm Reduction Australia’s pill testing proposals are another manifestation of this failed, use-expanding framework.
Pill Testing Australia, which is auspiced by Harm Reduction Australia, now seeks government support for the more expensive DART-MS technology capable of measuring the dose and purity of drugs in party pills, which their previous FTIR technology could not. Given that hundreds of Australians have died from normal recreational doses of ecstasy (see p 15), and that deaths more particularly select a small subset of individuals that have a physiological vulnerability to MDMA, such more-targeted dosing advice championed by advocates ignores the obvious - that individuals unaware they are vulnerable have no idea what dosing level will hospitalise or kill them. The fact is that ecstasy users can die from doses 1/77th of that ingested by surviving users. Advising a new user to take ½ a pill, followed by another ½ later if all feels well ignores the fact that even half a pill is deadly for some. Advice on dosing is necessarily working in the dark for those unaware individuals who will be affected. When it is considered that there have been only 11 deaths in 25 years (see p 15) from other deadly drugs mixed in ecstasy pills and yet hundreds have died from normal recreational doses of ecstasy, pill testing provides no protective effect for ecstasy use while superficially providing a false aura of greater safety, which will inevitably lead to a broader pool of prospective users and inevitably more deaths (see p 33).
When the ‘harm reduction’ of pill testing is pitted against the outright harm reduction of well-conducted policing at festivals, which aims to deter users from bringing in pills and ingesting them, keeping users from putting ecstasy pills in their mouths is superior to advising users on ‘safer’ dosing. And those that claim that policing doesn’t stop users from bringing pills into festivals nevertheless recognise that ecstasy use would vastly increase if all policing was discontinued.
Drug Free Australia urges State and Territory governments to conduct, for the first time, a united and concerted social/commercial media campaign alerting prospective and current ecstasy users to the real dangers of its use, modeled on the highly successful Australian quit-smoking campaigns. This must include information on the ongoing damage of ecstasy use to the brain and heart via vaso-constriction caused by ecstasy, using factual information like this. The relative unknowns of ecstasy’s amplified toxicity in social settings with elevated temperatures, the interactions of MDMA and alcohol, as well as differing solubility rates in pills and powders which variably affect metabolism and toxicity must be included. Drug Free Australia believes that ecstasy users, as with tobacco users, will positively respond to honest and factual information about the real dangers of use. All Police Departments should also be encouraged to have seized or intercepted club drugs tested by high resolution testing equipment, providing media alerts when abnormalities are detected while still emphasising the dangers of use.
Below the signature are Drug Free Australia’s concerns about the conduct of the NSW Deputy Coroner’s music festival deaths inquest.
Gary Christian
RESEARCH DIRECTOR
Drug Free Australia
0422 163 141
DRUG FREE AUSTRALIA’S CONCERNS REGARDING THE NSW INQUEST INTO MUSIC FESTIVAL DEATHS
Drug Free Australia highlights serious concerns about certain questionable assumptions which the NSW Deputy Coroner, Harriet Grahame, has brought to her inquests on illicit drug deaths. In her 31 March 2019 findings on 6 opiate-related deaths in NSW, Deputy Coroner Grahame asserted that “drug prohibition policies are rarely successful and are highly likely to cause harm to many in the community.” This is the identical assumption used by those seeking to end the prohibition of illicit drugs with the goal of legalising and regulating their sale and use. The assumption is clearly wrong. It is the same as saying that policing has failed to eliminate stealing and rape, thus they should no longer be prohibited. Such an assumption ignores the fact that policing seeks to contain, rather than eliminate, certain negative human behaviours, including illicit drug use.
Measuring one of these negative behaviours, the 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey found that 97% of Australians do not approve the regular use of ecstasy (see p 125), which would surely indicate that Australians do not want more ecstasy use, but less. The Deputy Coroner’s false assumption has previously led to her inevitably recommending more permissive approaches to drug policy, citing Portugal’s failed policy as a notional example of possible alternatives. Yet Portugal’s decriminalising the use of all illicit drugs led to a 59% increase in drug use between 2001 and 2017 (see p 10), as compared to Australia’s ‘Tough on Drugs’ prevention approach reducing drug use by 39% between 1998 and 2007 (see p 12). Portugal’s opiate deaths also increased by 59% over the same period (see p 16). In the UK, where ecstasy use and deaths are tracked yearly (as opposed to other European countries where records of deaths are poor or non-existent) ‘the Loop’ commenced public pill testing in 2013 with ecstasy use at 1.2% (see p 7). By 2017 it had increased to 1.7%. There were 43 ecstasy deaths in 2013, rising to 92 deaths in 2018. This is a harm reduction failure on any reading.
The NSW Inquest’s schedule of hearings during its second week (September 9-13) predominantly focused on the feasibilities of pill testing to the almost entire exclusion of prevention approaches. It has ignored the fact that drug prohibition has worked with spectacular success over its first 50 years before drug legalisation advocates (Leary, Ginsberg, Burroughs etc) mounted their international assault on prohibition with rising drug deaths ever since. The Inquest has also ignored examples of countries like Sweden, which had the highest levels of drug use in the developed world in the late 60’s, but which had reduced them to the lowest levels by 1992 via sensible prevention programming. Iceland is a current success (see p 50) which the Inquest has also ignored. Drug Free Australia’s concern is that harmful harm reduction ideologies have driven the NSW Inquest, with very little interest in successful prevention.