What in the what with pill testing at music festivals

Harshing your buzz or saving your life? Pill testing could be the way of the future, if only the NSW Government would quit living in the past.

Harshing your buzz or saving your life? Pill testing could be the way of the future, if only the NSW Government would quit living in the past.

Or, you know, stop taking the ‘la la la I can’t hear you’ approach to drug policy where there are no drug deaths or drug overdoses because no one takes them.

Yes, that fantasy world.

In the past year seven people have died from taking drugs at music festivals, with a group of doctors calling for pill testing to become standard practise at the events.

Dr Alex Wodak has argued that pill testing at NSW music festivals will decrease drug deaths, with the Australian Drug Reform Foundation,  The Greens, music festivals, Labor MPs, academics, physicians and even a mother who lost her son to drugs at a music festival all coming out in support of this move.

Premier Mike Baird, however, is against it because: “There is a very safe way to go about pills and that is don’t take them.”

According to Fairfax, 400,000 Aussies aged between 14 and 29 took ecstasy last year while a 2013 survey by the Australian National Council on Drugs found 82% of those aged between 16 and 25 supported pill testing.

While pill testing would check to make sure the chemicals you were about to consume were at safe levels that wouldn’t – you know – kill you, the NSW State Government is opposed to this based on the premise that they think pill testing is effectively condoning drug use.

With Australia having the highest recreational drug use out of any country in the world, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon so local doctors have said they're going to start pill testing at music festival - with or without the government's support.