Pill testing will never cure the recklessness of drug taking
As the NSW inquest rolls on, we need to look past the six young people who lost their lives, and ask why it is that we’re so desperate to outsource the responsibility of having hard conversations, writes Louise Roberts.
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Pill testing will never be the cure for the recklessness of drug taking.
This week’s inquest into the harrowing deaths of six young people who overdosed at NSW dance festivals has finally skewered a shameful campaign undermining everything we do to protect our kids.
Nathan Tran, Diana Nguyen, Joseph Pham, Callum Brosnan, Joshua Tam and Alexandra Ross-King were all aged between 18 and 23 years of age. All of them died after taking illicit drugs.
All of them essentially cooked to death because their body temperatures soared and they suffered fatal heart attacks.
Paul Dillon, the founder and director of Drug and Alcohol Research and Training, this week described the notion that pill testing would magically end drug deaths as “ludicrous”. Likewise, it must be said that harm minimisation strategy is not the panacea to the threat posed by swallowing a pill or capsule.
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But there are those relentlessly pushing this message, oblivious to logic and scientific fact. Kids will take MDMA and other chemical substances, they say, so make it safe. Reduce the harm.
Sell them kits which they use to test the purity and then everything will be ‘happy ever after’. The drugs won’t kill them because they’ll only take the safe ones. You can’t stop them.
But no drug like this is safe.
That is a lie and a con and an appalling narrative fed to our kids. Our children. Our babies.
And they will always be that, even when they get a driving licence and a job and a mortgage like us.
And when they die before us they become our lost babies — names and photos of them joyful and frozen in their prime now a gallery of wasted life and despair.
This week we have been reminded of those faces.
Nathan Tran, Diana Nguyen, Joseph Pham, Callum Brosnan, Joshua Tam and Alexandra Ross-King.
And probably the only useful thing to rise from the ashes of these destroyed lives is the evidence which your kids and mine must reminded of. The horrible excruciating, almost unreadable detail of the way these freshly-minted adults died.
Their faces should be on display at these music festivals, if indeed these events are allowed to continue.
Diana Nguyen, 21, had a nasopharyngeal airway device jammed through her nostril in an ultimately futile attempt to help her breathe and cool down. Two capsules of MDMA in and she was incoherent, sweating, jaw clenching and then, with a body temperature of 39.5 degrees, dead after cardiac arrest.
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Alexandra Ross-King, 19, died after taking up to three pills in close proximity to avoid detection by police.
“The January FOMO festival involved an unusual pattern of consumption for her (Alexandra),” Counsel assisting the coroner, Dr Peggy Dwyer, said at the NSW Coroners Court in Lidcombe on Monday.
“She told her friends that because she was nervous about being caught by the police, she took the drugs at once like that.”
Joseph Pham’s body temperature spiked at 39.5 degrees. Unresponsive with dilated pupils and his jaw muscles spasming, it was an hour before he got into an ambulance. Eventually he went into cardiac arrest and died.
As The Daily Telegraph reported in January as part of an investigation into the validity of pill testing, MDMA itself is a toxin capable of killing. But a pill of 100 per cent purity can result in death. This is the science, as explained by the state’s chief toxicologist Professor Andrew Dawson.
Meanwhile, Mr Dillon told day two of the hearing that the perception that MDMA is safe is “now getting really scary”.
Young Aussies are taking two or three caps in one go known as “double or triple dropping”.
Tell me that’s OK from your average suburban dining table while you polish off another bottle of sauv blanc debating the point of Just Say No.
The coroner charged with making sense of the young lives lost at these festivals has a big job ahead — two weeks of evidence, expert witnesses, doctors, police and families of the victims.
“In this courtroom there is no judgment of the young people themselves,” Dr Dwyer said, “These six young people were beautiful souls who have been lost to us. Without exception, they were talented, social and community-minded.”
Yet, we do not blame them. They are now memories and statistics.
But we should blame ourselves.
There is no safe drug use. Instead, our kids are falling victim to a middle class malaise that won’t tell young people not to do something dumb and dangerous, but which instead calls on the state to mitigate the risk and make the illegal thing OK.
We have allowed this soft approach to flourish and those who do dispute this are accused of being out of touch with reality.
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So you would rather kids die, they argue redundantly.
No, I would rather we not make it easy for them to take drugs in the first place.
We have learned from the inquest that the NSW Ministry of Health data shows that up to 90 per cent of young music festival patrons use drugs.
So they are a captive audience. Why are we pandering to them by offering to test their drugs? Isn’t there inherent permission attached to that?
My heart breaks for these parents who have lost their kids — what could be worst and also to find out after the fact that they were drug takers.
But we must never give up on the message — no matter how unfashionable it might be.