It’s been a wild time for some ever since Australia’s first pill-testing facility was trialled at Groovin The Moo Canberra earlier this year.
While the landmark trial came back with disturbing details about some of the 83 drugs tested, the upshot of those results was that many of the punters who owned the bad drugs decided to bin them, causing many to hail the whole thing a big success – which is fair enough.
While The Greens and other advocates of harm minimisation measures to try and combat drug overdoses have been calling for the trial to be rolled out to other Aussie music festivals, some politicians, such as Craig Kelly and Jeremy Hanson, have been claiming that a wider adoption of pill-testing would lead to an increase in drug use and, therefore, deaths.
“What we may benefit on the one hand, will actually have adverse consequences by giving the encouragement and the green-lights to the greater use of drugs in our society and our community,” Kelly has said to triple j’s Hack. “By saying it’s a good batch of drugs, I believe it could result in an increase drugs and a greater rates of deaths and greater harm to our society.”
This was followed by a statement from Hanson.
“What we’re seeing from evidence overseas, places like the UK where they have pill-testing, what happens is more people take drugs and more people die as a consequence,” he told 2GB.
Turns out though that RMIT ABC Fact Check researchers have since run his claims through their own testing facilities, and debunked these crazy tall-tales.
“Mr Hanson’s claim doesn’t check out,” says researcher Claudia Long said to Hack. “There is no evidence that pill-testing results in festival attendees and partygoers taking more drugs and dying as a consequence. There is evidence to suggest that pill-testing can make some users more likely to dispose of their drugs or take smaller quantities of them,” she continues.
“In the UK, two thirds of users said they would not take drugs found to have harmful substances and more than half said test results had affected their consumption choices.”
Let’s hope this can lead to more beneficial conversation around the pill-testing trials…