Pill testing is just a mask for the real issue

Pill testing at music festivals would only legitimise the dealers and organised crime, writes Peta Credlin. We must make organisers of these drug events culpable.

Another music festival and another young life tragically lost.

But more than lost, these lives are wasted, in all senses of the word, because “lost” is what we say when someone dies of cancer or drowns in a boating mishap.

In the case of these drug-induced deaths, the young person has chosen to play Russian roulette with their own life and been complicit in the risk that they might end up on a mortuary slab.

I know that’s tough but most of us have faced similar choices as we’ve made our way to adulthood, where the risk and opportunity to exploit the “devil may care” attitudes of youth can collide with such disastrous consequences.

As my mum and good friends well know, I was hardly an exemplar during my university days.

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I loved to go out and stay out late and travelled all over the place to go to B&S balls (the music festivals of my generation I suppose). But despite the offers and availability, drugs never entered the equation.

A man being treated by medics at the FOMO music festival in Western Sydney. A 19-year-old woman died in hospital after taking drugs at the festival. Picture: David Swift.

Not for a minute did I ever think taking something cooked-up and pushed around by a bikie gang was a good idea.

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So why now, when there’s death after death, are young people so dumb? And if they don’t know this now, pill testing isn’t going to make them smarter.

It certainly won’t make them any safer and in fact, it just waters down the strong message that this stuff kills because no test can guarantee you your life. Worse, testing legitimises the dealers and organised crime and, grows their market.

Like parasites, the drug liberalisation lobby seize on these deaths as evidence that “making drugs illegal doesn’t work”; that we should give up and accept defeat.

Festival goers at FOMO experienced a heavy police presence searching for drugs. Picture: David Swift.

Well murder has been a part of humanity since the beginning, but we still regard it as illegal and imprison the perpetrators, so why give up here?

Surely the real target should be the organisers of these drug events (because that’s what they are, the music is almost ancillary, especially if you require drugs to enjoy it).

They earn millions but have no apparent regard for the lives of their patrons — how do they get away with it?

A licensed publican has rules about responsible service of alcohol but no politician seems to be tackling the big organisers of these drug events — isn’t that the real issue?