Pill Testing is essential in upcoming likely festival heatwave conditions: the summer calculus of risk has changed.
Another summer littered with the premature and preventable deaths of young people. Another summer where the NSW government, armed with sound coronial findings and decades of expert advice, appears set to stall on implementing some very basic measures to keep young ‘uns alive. This post doesn’t say anything new that cannot be found on the excellent Pill Testing Australia website (another worthy project/achievement by Harm Reduction Australia and OG medicos who drove it). What it aims to do is colour in some pretty rational fears that even I, a non-parent, can see growing over the summer.
- Festivals being held in searing heat-waves.
- Increasingly potent pills as black marketeers compete for rep/word of mouth and sales. All those gangland shootings and stabbings on the news? This is the turf they’re ultimately fighting over. It’s our Drug War.
- Panicked multi-pill consumption of a batch that this reasonable, ordinary teenager-twenty-something ought to have been binned in its entirety had they been made aware of its constituents by a medically trained professional.
- Panicked multi-pill consumption as a result of sniffer dogs. Heatstroke.
- Panicked multi-pill consumption as a result of police (dogs or no dogs) and their power to strip-search festival goers. Cardiac Arrest.
In an environment of heightened panicked pill consumption, it defies logic that you’d not implement a measure whereby risk-taking kids know the potency-constituency of their disco biscuits. The very simple rationale being that once warned of a pill’s ingredients and/or potency, a young person won’t put a potentially fatal dose into their bodies at the first sign of a labrador or a cop.
Gangland Bikie Wars are just a manifestation of the Drug War. As is the case anywhere in the world that outlaws the trade in illicit drugs, which presently is 99% of the planet. Media buffoonery serves up both Sydney and Melbourne gangland wars as this weird type of kabuki reality TV featuring mostly brown people and the odd Bra Boy.
One pinger can be a fatal dose when these are the forces which drive potency and experimentation in any market. I have no idea how Shaun Ryder and Bez are still alive or how anyone in ‘Madchester’ managed to throw shapes with all the bullets flying around as crims battled for control of the MDMA/Ecstasy trade.
The prospect of gibbering away my deepest darkest thoughts to people you’d ordinarily avoid at the water cooler whilst listening to the sound of Transformers being intimate on sheet-metal (or “dubstep” if you like), horrifies me. It makes sense that MDMA figured in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control programs and why it is again showing promise as a therapeutic aid in the treatment of PTSD. The doyens of the Psychedelic Renaissance would have you believe that your brain’s Default Mode Network gets the dishwasher self-clean treatment on MDMA manufactured to GMP standards. I’m awaiting a catch-up with a veteran mate who underwent assisted MDMA therapy. By all reports it helped them unpack a lot of stuff that drove negative and addictive behaviours.
This IS ultimately the main reason why Merck developed the stuff in 1912, as a therapeutic aid for shrinks in helping clamped up/traumatised people, unpack and rework negative neural pathways with positives ones. Go read any Michael Pollan. As with any drug where the therapeutic benefit also gives rise to a serotonin or dopamine buzz, humans have been augmenting communal dance sessions with these drugs (via plants and fungi) from time immemorial. If you follow the trope that we are a Western Civilisation then you accept being the philosophical descendants of people who raved in caves after consuming all manner of psychedelic substances. See Dr Karen Hitchcock’s excellent 2018 piece on the broader angle of why we consume drugs-with-medical-uses-or-potential outside of a Setting geared around the obtaining of a therapeutic benefit for a specific illness or dis-ease.
Drug, Set and Setting. People will always take drugs to heighten their senses and increase pleasure. You can’t stop it. But you can stop young people from harming themselves by necking a handful of pills at the first sight of The Man.
Pill Testing Saves Lives. It is imbecilic to argue otherwise.
But imbeciles will do what imbeciles do and young people will die. Yes, imbecilic is not an overly cruel adjective in describing a mode of thinking that when presented the basic facts and trackable data proving pill testing saves lives, continues to maintain the status quo, no – to ratchet the risk environment up several notches with sniffer dogs and the strip searching of festival goers, some of them minors.
So young people will die, and the founding colony of these Colonies keeps kicking the issue further into touch. As of 3 October, the official position is that Pill Testing “isn’t being ruled out.”
Today’s pills are not the same as what we, the people in the age group who came of age the first time pingers did a round of the yoof, experienced. Much of all these gangland shootings, stabbings and assassinations (ie murders) we’re currently seeing revolve around securing the biggest market share in a competitive space. The distribution and sale of MDMA in a belter of a Sydney summer.
Even with the best of intent of pioneering chemists and psychonauts, once a substance obtains currency on the black market, the usual suspects will step in and cater to that market. That’s not great for quality control.
There have also been remarkable advances in chemistry in recent decades and new and novel substances are common. Many of these exist solely as a biochemical temporary circumvention of legislation, ie it can’t be illegal because the government doesn’t yet know this substance exists. It seems as if many or most of these newbie drugs will mess you up.
In other words, the calculus of risk has evolved. The vendors of MDMA will maximise their own profits at the expense of customer welfare if no-one is checking their shit. If that means stronger pills, so be it. Pill Testing advocates make no claim that their service acts as a deterrent against crooks cutting their pills with lethal or unknown materials. With material coming in from F knows where 24/7, it’s more likely than not that the manufacturers of those pills know or care about Australian festival drug testing matters.
Here, we’re talking about using impurities and newly created compounds to dilute the batch and crank out more disco biscuits, more profits, period. It’s just much worse than it was twenty or thirty years ago.
Cartels will do that.
In the summer of 2023 with still much post-lockdown yoof energy to burn off, the forecast is not looking favourable. And both urban and rural Australia will be affected. The heat and The Heat combined in a panicked young mind rarely leads to sensible outcomes. We need to sort this before we lose another son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin/dear friend whanau/family member of any sort.
If you are a parent, especially one where your kids are of the age where mysterious sleepovers are code for pissing off to the bush to drop caps and dance to doof-doof music, then the need to get Pill Testing sanctioned and working requires no in-depth explanation. You love your kids and you don’t want them to die. You know your kids are info-savvy and carry around a device that basically has access to all information accumulated and stored by our species since we came down from the trees.
You know that if a doctor (or similar white-coated person with sufficient gravitas) had a precious twenty minutes to engage with your kids and run them through some general background of where their products likely come from, who made them and that yes, in all likelihood, their MDMA could well be a product of the Mexican Drug Wars. You know your kids would be receptive to that.
It goes without saying that you know that if a doctor told them that their pills contained certain substances that have presented in fatalities “in the literature”, you’d rest somewhat easier knowing that caring smart people gave then this information (and an amnesty bin).
So, “not ruling Pill Testing out” is the same as dithering until the next inevitable death of another young person with a whole other bunch of fun risk-tasking behaviour and long life ahead of them, has that life cut short.
21 and 26. You despair for all who loved them and will miss them.
Let’s recognise that today’s heatwaves are not like the stubbies & thongs summers of World Series Cricket. Human physiology and stimulant drugs don’t combine well in searingly hot weather. This risk is inflated when existing policy poses some added panic consumption risks at every turn. Filter it all through a social media culture that worships and rewards risk-taking and the solution to the problem is staring you in the face.
A single volunteer-run Pill Testing Australia set up in a NSW festival can communicate news of known fatality-inducing substances (ie bad pills) like wildfire precisely because of this social media obsession. In the age of the Nutmeg-Cinnamon & Benadryl Challenge and socials/devices generally, telling kids to Just Say No isn’t going to wash. We need to add another barricade against excessive and tragic consequences flowing from the most ordinary of youthful decisions and impulses. To dance and have fun.
Pill Testing doesn’t claim to be a silver bullet because when it comes to stopping homo-sapiens from gathering en masse to dance, it simply doesn’t exist. Pill Testing is a no-brainer and it will save lives.
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Mat Henderson 