Tasmania rejects pill-testing at music festivals

Image: Hobart festival Dark Mofo

Tasmania is the latest to reject pill-testing at music festivals. The idea was brought up in the island state by the Greens. The party’s safer festival experience policy offers five testing machines and two full time staff to offer pill-testing at major festivals and events around Tasmania.

Greens health spokeswoman Rosalie Woodruff brought it up in State Parliament, asking Police Minister Rene Hidding if the State Government would consider pill-testing as punitive measures had not stopped drug taking at festivals.

“The evidence shows it will keep our young people safe from harmful drugs, and it has the support of the Police Association,” Woodruff said.

But Minister Hidding stood resolutely against the idea. “This Government will not provide quality assurance for drug pushers,” he said.

In December, three people were charged with drug offences at the Falls Festival at Marion Bay. Two attendees were taken to Royal Hobart Hospital.

Police Association’s President Pat Allen told The Mercury that pill-testing could be overseen by the Health Department.

“It makes a lot of sense, it makes sense to anyone in this day and age that that should done, at least try and protect them that way,” he said. “If we can’t be there and do the policing role, some other department could actually take care of that, if they wanted to.

“Members do understand that we can’t be everywhere and we can’t control what people do all the time or control their want to take this stuff.”

The possibility of pill-testing at Australian music festivals became a national issue in February after a group of medical professionals, lead by Drug Law Reform Foundation President, Dr. Alex Wodak, decided to respond in the wake of one of the worst summers for overdoses and deaths at music festivals around the country.

“The number of these deaths seems to be increasing, the number of the presentations to emergency departments of people attending these events is increasing, and it doesn’t have to be like this,” Dr Wodak said at the time.

But the NSW Government stood firm, saying pill-testing would undermine what law enforcement groups were trying to do. It also echoed one of the Tasmanian Government’s refusals: that these would merely make the work of drug dealers easier.

Since then, the doctors maintain that they have raised the funding for pill testing machine (about $100,000 at each event) and been in talks with Government, police and health officials in other states to begin tests at festivals during the 2016/7 summer festivals.