High cost of booze turning teenagers towards cheaper drugs

The surging cost of booze at summer festivals is driving teens towards cheap and deadly party drugs with powerful MDMA pills nearing the cost of a single beer.

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The surging cost of booze at summer festivals is driving teens towards cheap and deadly party drugs with powerful MDMA pills nearing the cost of a single beer.

University of Newcastle criminologist Dr Xanthé Mallett said teenagers were turning to party drugs because they had become far cheaper than alcohol at festivals.

Revellers were paying an eye-watering $13 for a drink a Sydney’s Field Day festival this year while a report by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Committee estimated that potent MDMA pills sell for roughly $15 each on the street.

“There seems to be a trend where kids are willing to take the risk because it is cheaper, lasts longer and is faster,” Dr Mallet said.

Teens are turning to cheap drugs because of the cost of alcohol. Picture: Derrick Krusche

“These are kids and most of us with full-time jobs would struggle to buy beers at those prices so the kids will find away around the prices and they tend to turn to cheap drugs.

“If festivals charge more reasonable prices it might draw people away from the cheap quick fixes which give users the instant gratification of a powerful high.

“Kids will still need to be careful from a hydration point of view but it removes the allure to cheap drugs from a cost perspective.”

DJ Daniel Healy said the drinks were also low strength, meaning punters needed to buy far more than you would at a pub.

“If drinks at festivals were actually full strength and you didn’t need to sell a kidney to buy one, this drug dependency culture wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as what we are seeing today,” he said.

Festival goers at the FOMO music festival. Picture: David Swift.

“I attended Field Day in Sydney the start of this year and an alcoholic ginger beer was 0.9 standard drinks and it was $12.90 .”

Dr Mallet said it was also important to made sure supply chains were disrupted because MDMA was so cheap because of its prevalence.

“Supply and demand is important because it is so easy to get these drugs … just look at how many people are caught with them every festival,” she said.

“We also need to send a message to the community and when someone is caught with 300 pills we need to think about how many lives that number of pills will impact in terms of sentencing.”