Former detective Gary Raymond takes a hard line on drug users

Another festival death has former detective Gary Raymond shaking his head. His tough approach to deterring teens from drugs includes a trip to the mortuary.

PARRAMATTA ADVERTISER: Gary Raymond takes a hard line on pill testing.

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PEER pressure, denial and a sense of invincibility are causing young people to die from drug overdoses. Former veteran detective Gary Raymond, who was at the coalface of the heroin epidemic that gripped Cabramatta in the 1990s, has slammed pill testing.

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I’d love to see teenagers take a trip to town to the city mortuary and watch the autopsies. I really think they need a wake-up call because they’re very complacent.

They think overdoses “won’t happen to me”.

It’s like crashing a vehicle. That only happens to other people, not me. They’re the young people who end up in a morgue slab because they trust their peers.

They’re in denial, thinking it won’t happen to them or their family. The kids keep it to themselves. If you want to ask if a child’s taking drugs, ask their friends, not their parents.

Their friends know everything about them.

It’s a regret for all those involved and have to go home and put their friend in a plastic bag in a fridge in the city morgue.

I think peer pressure is the biggest thing.

They think, “OK, I went to school with you, I went to youth group with you”. They don’t use this blind trust anywhere else in their life.

19-year-old Alex Ross-King, died of a suspected drug overdose at the FOMO music festival in Parramatta on Saturday, January 12. Picture: Facebook

Young people have to talk to their friends not to take drugs.

They should encourage each other — almost make a contract — that they won’t take drugs or outside a prescribed one of what the doctor ordered.

Anyone else who gives someone else a drug, by definition, is an enemy.

At Cabramatta I used to say “here’s a dictionary, look up the definition of a friend” and they would go pale.

We weren’t created to introduce a foreign substance into our bodies and brain.

‘Pill testing doesn’t cover the entire parameters of what’s in that pill”: Gary Raymond.

There’s no such thing as safe drug taking. If you take a substance outside the body’s parameters you’re going to have a pretty disastrous result.

Even pill testing doesn’t cover the entire parameters of what’s in that pill. You’d have to go to a lab.

How dare the adults say ‘We’re going to test the pill for use and let them use it. How dare they do it?

Where are the doctors saying ‘don’t take drugs at all’? With those drugs they hallucinate and have dire consequences.

Festival goers at the FOMO Music Festival at Parramatta Park were met with a heavy police presence searching for drugs. Picture: David Swift

They only count deaths and don’t count the criminal behaviour and psychosis.

We’ve had people jump off buildings, we get them drinking and thinking trains are going to stop because it diminishes alertness. They’re thinking it’s enhanced when it’s diminished.

There’s nothing positive about this pill testing scheme.

If they bring drugs to the party they’re not going to throw it in the bin unless there’s a sniffer dog there.

Future generations are going to be shaking their head. Unfortunately human nature, it can only get worse before it gets better.

Years ago, when people got sick, they used to bleed them, take blood out of them and many died but now they do the opposite and do a blood transfusion.

I can’t understand why people would want to take a toxin that ruins their brain — it’s beyond understanding.

Alex Ross-King died on Saturday. Picture: Facebook

I was young once and I could have a good time without getting drunk and drugs.

We had a great time without frying our brains or dehydrating our brains.

Young people don’t think of the consequences of doctors, ambulance working to save lives. I was an ambulance officer, too, for five years before I joined the police.

I number of times I had to resuscitate someone who overdosed, watching their eyes glaze over and die, and knock on the door of their parents’ homes and say “that beautiful son or daughter of yours, you’ll never see them again because they’re going to the city morgue”.

It’s not only the drugs, it’s the behaviour and sexual assaults. There’s a whole enclave of crime going on with this stuff.

Police should be out there patrolling instead of babysitting stupid teenagers.

Politicians have got to stop worrying about their popularity contest and their voting blocks and think about saving lives. They should be taking the lead.