Banning festivals in Australia is pointless

Mr Wall said a thorough study of every MDMA-related death for five years in Australia found almost none occurred at music festivals. “The police, significant medical facilities and the media are not present at peoples’ homes when they take drugs, so of course anything that happens doesn’t make headlines,” he said. “On top of that, it’s clearly not nearly as safe a place to be. With the amount of policing, security, medical staff, customer education and supervision inherent in a music festival, it’s quite literally one of the safest places on earth you can go. Removing festivals could increase harm, but not reduce it. It would be like banning patrolled surf beaches.”

So, rather than continuing to shriek BAN IT at everything in sight from the roof of parliament house after a few soda waters with the lads, surely Mr Baird should at least engage an open discussion about other options?

To us, it seems like music festivals are doing all they can to prevent these tragic incidents. But others out there with a whole lot of power on the issue aren’t.

“The government should be working with festival organisers to ensure they have the most reliable access to pill-testing possible,” Mr Shoebridge said. “Get rid of the drug dogs. If they’re not going to do that, they should do what the UK does and put in place amnesty bins. Rather than have that panic ingestion (of drugs) they should be able to place them in an amnesty bin.”

Dr Wodak agreed the government was ignoring a great opportunity to minimise harm and potentially save lives by refusing to entertain the idea of pill-testing. “There is a direct benefit to the consumer - if they find out that the pill contains a toxin, most consumers throw the pill away,” he said. “The main reason that the drug market is dangerous is that untested drugs are sold from unregulated outlets. Pill-testing would be a form of quasi-regulation.”

In January, an open letter signed by Mr Shoebridge and Dr Wodak called on the NSW government and police to work with music festivals to allow trials of independent pill-testing this summer. The letter was submitted with more than 550 signatures, and has so far been met with “embarrassing silence” from the government, according to Mr Shoebridge. “That’s consistent with their approach on drugs which is not reliant on evidence and working for a solution, but just hoping it will go away,” Mr Shoebridge said.

So what can we do to make sure governments in NSW and across Australia accept their own responsibility and listen to calls for a safer approach to drugs?

Not shut up, basically.

Start conversations, write to newspapers, email MPs, share your views on social media, sign the open letter and join the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.

It all helps.

“There’s a historical inevitability to this. But we will only get it when the community voice is so strong that it forces the … government to act,” Mr Shoebridge said. “We know it saves lives. I think we really need to shout them down with some civil disobedience on it.”

Scott Carbines is Mixmag's Australian Online News Editor, follow him on Twitter here.

[Image via: Duncographic]