Sydney music festival season is a ripe time for drug dealers to make money
AS FAR as the drugs industry is concerned, the music festival season is like fruit picking time, a chance to earn a bumper crop of cash, but not care about the consequences.
NSW
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IT starts in November. The clandestine drug labs tucked away in suburban back rooms, secreted in rural sheds or urban garages go into overdrive.
The festival season is fast approaching and the criminals hope to make vast and quick profits all at the risk of young lives. This is their equivalent of the pre-Christmas rush.
Production is ceaseless, 24/7, churning out vast amounts of MDMA, ecstasy, ice and other narcotics to be consumed by music-obsessed youths who want nothing more sinister than to have
a good time.
From the top of the supply chain, the combination of possible routes the drugs take before reaching the dance floor are almost infinite, making the job of police even harder.
In the past, drugs have been buried at dance venues days or even weeks in advance.
Other suppliers have been caught bringing their wares through security in their body cavities or disguised in their water bottles.
The job of the police is made even harder because they simply don’t know who to trust. At one recent festival the security staff, the very people meant to be keeping the drug dealers at bay, were charged with supplying drugs.
And then there’s the way the trade keeps evolving.
In the past, commercial pill presses were left on overnight, pounding and compressing the powder into neat little tablets.
These days, the pill press is on the decline.
Instead, drug suppliers are moving more towards supplying drugs in capsules or caps.
Alternatively, suppliers peddle their drugs as powder or liquid, leaving the end user to do the guess work of filling the drug into a capsule.
“It’s all caps these days,” one senior police source said.
“Pill presses are too hard to get.”
Without a valid reason for using one, pill presses are illegal in NSW, meaning drug manufacturers have to buy them on the black market, either locally or internationally.
Presses are noisy and have a propensity for breaking down, with replacement parts being hard to find.
Capsules, on the other hand, are susceptible to breaking down when exposed to moisture or heat, but are legal and significantly easier to obtain online or through retail shops.
At Field Day on Friday, Redfern Region Enforcement Squad Commander Chief Inspector Stuart Bell said 184 people were charged with either capsules, pills or a combination of both.
“No drugs were buried at the event earlier,” he said. “All the detections were the result of drug dogs or by covert police outside the premises.”
Sylvia Choi, the 25-year-old who died from an overdose at the Stereosonic Music Festival in November, was part of a social media chat group called “Bulk4Stereonickkk”. She discussed buying “yellow snapchat” MDMA tablets three days before she attended the festival.
The move away from pill presses means that drug suppliers are less tied to their geographic location. A November 2010 bust by Surry Hills Region Enforcement Squad showed how just one pill press could be linked to a wide number of areas.
The investigation resulted in four men being arrested in a series of raids and police seizing a pill press capable of pumping out 50,000 pills an hour.
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