How music festival goers are smuggling drugs into venues

REVELLERS are hiding illegal drugs at music festival sites weeks before the concert to avoid police and security checks.

REVELLERS are hiding illegal drugs at music festival sites weeks before the concert to avoid police and security checks.

With this year’s festival season in full swing, police have also noted festival-goers are resorting to increasingly extreme lengths to smuggle drugs such as ecstasy into venues, including hiding them in their body cavities.

Dealers and users have been caught vising the festival venue days or weeks beforehand and hiding pills in obscure places so they can retrieve them on the day.

Central Metropolitan Region Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty, who’s squad runs drug operations for many major festivals in Sydney, said festival-goers were now using strange and dangerous methods to avoid detection.

“Every year there appears to be more detections taking place and it still doesn’t seem to deter them,” he said.

“We have seen at a number of recent dance festivals an increase in internal concealment, which is obviously a method of not being detected by the drug dog or police.

“But we have seen at recent events that it hasn’t worked. The dogs still pick that up.”

“Obviously people go to all sorts of efforts to get drugs in, including prior concealment or getting it through the fence lines.

“That’s where people might see things and we ask anyone who does see someone acting suspicious at one of these venues to contact us.”

Music festival goers are going to extreme lengths to get drugs, like ecstasy, at concerts.

Police sources say some security guards are also suspected of being involved in smuggling drugs into music festivals.

Women were caught smuggling drugs stashed inside condoms and hidden inside their bodies at a New Year’s Day dance festival in The Domain in central Sydney just two weeks ago.

The women were among a record 214 people caught by police with sniffer dogs at the Fuzzy Field Festival, a 50 per cent spike on drug detection from the previous year’s event.

The arrests included several people found with large quantities of illicit drugs, including a 20-year-old woman found with 75 ecstasy tablets, a 21-year-old woman with 50 ecstasy tablets and 19-year old man with 40 ecstasy tablets.

The crackdown came after the death of Georgina Bartter, 19, who was found collapsed at the Harbourlife dance party in November from a suspected drug reaction.

THE PATH OF A PILL

How drugs make it to Australia.

AFP, Customs and police drug seizures reveal a typical path for an ecstasy pill which ends up in the hands of a user at a Sydney music festival.

— More than $15 million worth of illegal drugs are manufactured at a makeshift clandestine lab in Box Hill using pure MDMA and another substance to lace the pill with, such as caffeine, washing powder and household cleaning chemicals.

— OR The pills are imported from Germany by Australian men, hidden in a mixed container load or furniture and unmarked boxes, weighing almost 2 tonnes.

— The pills are delivered to a warehouse in Blacktown, then repacked for delivery to a Bondi Beach apartment, where a distribution manager divides them into smaller quantities.

— A bag of about 70 pills are handed to a local dealer, via a third party, in a nearby eastern suburbs car park.

— The dealer smuggles the pills into a music festival at The Domain venue in Sydney using various methods, including internal concealment, burying them at the venue days earlier or bribing a security guard to look the other way as he enters.

— The pills are then discretely sold to users at the festival in exchange for cash, out of view of security or police officers.