The inside story of Labor’s sudden change of heart on pill testing

At the Hardmission electronic music festival in January, “people just started dropping” after taking party drugs on the 33-degree day at Flemington Racecourse. Victorian Mental Health Minister Ingrid Stitt already didn’t need to be personally convinced that pill testing was good policy. But the mass overdose, and those that followed, convinced her the time to act was now.

Five months later, new Premier Jacinta Allan announced a drug-checking trial with one fixed and 10 mobile sites. It followed years of hostility to the social reform under then-premier Daniel Andrews.

“It’s been a bit of, to be honest, an evolution,” Allan said.

The Hardmission Festival at Flemington Racecourse, where nine people overdosed on MDMA in January.

The Age has spoken to more than 20 people in Labor and in the sector – mostly on condition of anonymity to be frank about internal discussions – to understand the key moments that led the government to act.

The story goes back more than 12 months, and it follows years of advocacy, including from grieving families. But the dam broke when a string of young people overdosed on party drugs in the heat last summer.

“The overdoses was the big push,” one minister said.

More Labor MPs started making representations. Some got the feeling Allan was listening. And unionists, advocates and crossbench MPs were loudly pointing to repeated coronial inquiries that called on the state to try the reform.

Suddenly, Allan shifted her tone. She said she had asked the Health Department for advice.

In an interview with The Age on Friday, Stitt said she personally already supported drug checking before she came to the portfolio in October.

“Not long after that, we had the festival season, summer,” Stitt said. “So I had this sense of urgency about this issue because of the harm that was going on last summer.”

She viewed the issue through a harm-reduction lens, accepting that people took drugs, with concern for an increasingly volatile market.

“All of my personal views, in some ways, when you’re a minister responsible for government policy and decisions, you have to put that to one side a little bit.

“But the evidence around what’s been happening overseas … with fentanyl, just the explosion in opioid synthetics, that convinced me that – not that I needed much convincing – but it convinced me that the time was now, we had to get on with this.”

Paramedics dealt with 20 overdoses at six festivals in Victoria between January and March, exceeding the 18 in all of 2023. By mid-March, a man had died from a suspected overdose at Pitch festival in the Grampians during a heatwave. Three days later, another two coronial inquiries recommended a drug-checking trial.

Allan was said to have already personally backed the reform by then, and had supportive staff in her new office. And she put her stamp on it by announcing her view before it had cabinet’s sign-off. It means another key to this week’s announcement was her ascension to premier, taking over from Andrews.

“I don’t think you can take these drugs at any level and be safe,” Andrews said in some of his public comments over the years.

Drug checking was never debated in cabinet under Andrews as a result, three ministers who served during his leadership explained. “He made [his view] publicly known before we even had a debate,” one said.

“He wouldn’t have a bar of it,” another said. And it wasn’t at the top of many people’s to-do list: “You picked your battles.”

Stitt rejected the view that the change of leadership gave the government a clean slate to move, and repeated her view that the summer overdoses had created an urgency.

The “explosion in opioid synthetics” convinced Mental Health Minister Ingrid Stitt that the time for pill testing “was now, we had to get on with this”.Credit: Jason South

While Victoria fancied itself the progressive state, Queensland last year joined the ACT to trial drug checking.

Then, a rump of crossbench MPs that Labor relies on in the Victorian upper house made drug reform the main focus of debate in the final sitting week of 2023. The Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice Party jointly called for a drug-checking trial, and a separate bill on cannabis led Allan and others to admit they had smoked pot earlier in life.

It was a “kumbaya moment” on drug policy, one advocate joked, even if it was deflecting from the government going cold on the promised CBD safe-injecting room that would be dumped months later.

In April, the government formally walked away from that plan, despite a rise in heroin-related deaths in the City of Melbourne and fears that dangerous nitazenes (synthetic opioids) and fentanyl could circulate more widely. The government remains committed to the North Richmond facility, and the April announcement included a drug strategy with expanded pharmacotherapy.

By then, there was a growing belief in the sector that drug checking would happen and a suspicion it was a trade-off for the injecting room. The government has always rejected this.

“It’s certainly not the case,” Stitt said. “I don’t accept that it’s been a trade-off.”

Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell (left), Aiv Puglielli from the Greens, and Rachel Payne from Legalise Cannabis brought a bill before parliament last year.Credit: Justin McManus

Four Labor figures told The Age they viewed the injecting room as a bigger priority. Those users were at greater risk of harm, and were more vulnerable compared to weekend party-drug users who sometimes shelled out hundreds of dollars for a festival ticket.

Given the injecting room was canned because of backlash to any possible location, two of those sources speculated Allan had made a “political calculation” on what was easiest.

After left-wing policies fell by the wayside, one source said she “needed to put her mark on being progressive, on doing something” in announcing the trial. Labor is under threat from the Greens in key metro seats.

The government’s plan to include a fixed drug-checking site could still support heroin users by helping to identify nitazenes or fentanyl in their substances, and informing a drug surveillance and warning system.

But this cohort was left out of the messaging.

Allan first delivered her announcement late on Monday via Instagram, and said she had come to her views as a mother.

“As parents, my husband and I are always thinking about our kids growing up and making their own decisions. In a few years, they’ll be heading off to parties, to music festivals. Like all parents, I often catch myself thinking, ‘What if the worst happens?’”

Her colleagues backed this in. “Jacinta probably gets it as a parent,” one said. “It’s a thing.”

Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, the most senior minister from the Right faction, told The Age this was about peace of mind for families and good policy backed by evidence that would ease pressure on the health system.

“This is putting families first,” Carroll said. “If it can save one life, that is so important.”

RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist, said the government was talking to a generation of voters and a growing proportion of the electorate who did not view recreational drugs as taboo.

“It was a matter of time before it happened,” Samaras said. “She’s tipping her hat to a Victoria that is 2024, not 1994.”

While there had been no uprising in Labor caucus, some had been making representations to respond to the times.

Labor MP Sonja Terpstra had read her support for reform into Hansard in February: “Personally, individually, I actually think pill testing is a good idea.”

Still, there were a couple of ministers around the cabinet table on Monday who weren’t supportive.

The Labor rank and file, though, had made their views known at the party’s state conference last month by supporting a bloc of motions on drug reform put forward by the Health and Community Services Union.

Union secretary Paul Healey said he had been joking for about a year that he would organise a picket line around a guerilla pill-testing site to create a makeshift amnesty zone and block arrests.

“Fortunately, I only ever had to say it as a joke,” says Healey, who comes from a background working in mental health and wants bigger drug reform.

Pill testing allows users to have the contents of their substances analysed before consumption, followed by harm reduction advice from health professionals.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Drug checking or pill testing would allow a user to have the contents of their substances analysed before consumption. Risks and tailored harm reduction advice would be provided to punters, often in their first conversations with health professionals.

Pill testing won’t stop overdoses from occurring. But the experiences of other jurisdictions show it discourages people from taking drugs with unexpected substances.

The exact model is yet to be determined, including policing arrangements outside the service to ensure nobody is deterred from accessing it.

Police Association of Victoria secretary Wayne Gatt said pill testing flew in the face of the law and that the government would have to explain how it expects officers to enforce the law at events.

Glyn Hill, a co-founder of the Inner Varnika, Strawberry Fields and Sun Cycle festivals, said he would be keen to host a mobile pill-testing site, but wants assurances on the rules for policing around it.

Pill testing won’t stop overdoses from occurring. But the experiences of other jurisdictions show it discourages people from taking drugs with unexpected substances.

He said the normally competitive industry worked together on drug harm reduction and that the government’s former position on pill testing limited organisers’ ability to keep attendees safe, with some people fearful of getting in trouble if they sought medical help.

“The industry is much further ahead than the legislation,” Hill said.

A new cross-party Parliamentary Friends of Harm Reduction group was established in February to increase the pressure.

Paul Edbrooke, a Labor MP who co-chairs the group with Aiv Puglielli from the Greens, had been agitating for years. “I will continue to advocate for more evidence-based public health interventions,” he told The Age this week.

Fiona Patten (back left) and Gino Vumbaca (back right) at the 2019 pill-testing show and tell in front of MPs at Victorian Parliament.Credit: Harm Reduction Australia

The parliamentary friends group had discussed bringing Harm Reduction Australia to the halls of the Victorian Parliament, to analyse paracetamol in a “show and tell” of the machinery for state MPs. Advocates had already tried the display back in 2019, when reformer Reason Party MP Fiona Patten was loudly calling for change.

In the end, it wasn’t necessary again. Allan wants pill testing in Victoria for good.

If this story has raised issues about your own or others’ drug and alcohol use, please contact The National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.