Common sense says this idea worth supporting

LET’S get one thing straight, the “just say no” approach to drug taking has never worked — and never will.

Young people are, by nature, rebellious, ever willing to push the boundaries and at times rebel against society’s laws and conventions, even when they know it risks their own lives.

When we examine pill testing at music festivals, something else must be made clear.

Those who agree with the proposal (myself included), are not suggesting nor encouraging young people to break the law. The drugs commonly taken at festivals are illegal for a reason. They are dangerous and, at times, either in concentrations too high or cut with deadly poisons.

It is a fact people will buy pills to use at festivals, so we have a broader responsibility to protect and warn those people if they are at risk because they are about to take something that they are completely unaware of.

To take a contrary position is to bury one’s head in the sand. So how do we tackle this? We follow the lead of our northern neighbours and, at the very least, run a trial.

A trial with strict conditions and oversight.

The scenarios under way over the border involve the use of a mass spectrometer, able to analyse thousands of substances quickly and accurately, under close supervision of trained medical staff, counsellors and law enforcement.

Festival goers are invited to test their pills with a scraping, and if the test reveals something completely different to what they believed they had bought, such as deadly concentrations or cutting with other deadly substances, they are then armed with information that will potentially save their life, can dispose of the pills and can then warn the crowd through social media, word of mouth and even direct conversations with appointed “intervention” officers.

It must also be remembered that these drugs are being manufactured by people who are seeking to make maximum profit for little outlay, so they will use substances to cut the main drug that are common, cheap and easy to access.

Poisons they can literally buy off the supermarket shelf. So, what are the costs? Will this be expensive? Possibly. Will it tie up resources? Definitely.

But there are other overriding questions that need to be answered. Young people have died from pills at festivals, so will testing prevent further deaths?

The evidence, so far, and common sense says yes.

Can any of us look the parents of young people who have died at the hands of bad pills in the eye and tell them we won’t support something that may have prevented their death?

I can’t and I won’t. Because, at the end of the day, if pill testing can save just one person’s life, just one, then in my mind that’s an expense that is more than warranted, one the community should be willing to bear.