Pollies need to stop being pills when it comes to young lives

Tassie’s major parties are putting the lives of young people at risk, says Greg Barns

LAST week the Liberal Party and the ALP ensured that those who attend music festivals in Tasmania remain at a greater risk of being harmed.

Politicians from these parties shamefully voted against a proposed law from the Greens that would create a regimen for the testing of pills at these festivals.

The reasons given by the ALP were cynical and puerile. Labor’s police spokesperson Shane Broad described the Greens’ proposal as a stunt. Since when has saving lives and harm minimisation policies been a stunt?

Other members of the ALP accused the Greens of playing politics. They said the Greens’ proposal was the wrong model, without, of course, offering to work with the Greens to get it right.

The Liberal Party is morally bankrupt on drugs policy. It is like those individuals and groups in the 1980s who refused to allow condoms to be broadly available as a key means of stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Abstinence was the order of the day for that lot. Lives were lost because of this ideological nonsense and failure to deal with reality.

Young people take drugs and will take drugs no matter how many times police and politicians threaten crackdowns with sniffer dogs and roughing-up tactics.

Pill testing in Tasmania should proceed. The current legal position raises an intriguing moral question. If compliance with the law means the saving of lives and stopping serious harm, then there is a compelling moral case to disobey the law.

This was a view articulated in the recent Victorian election campaign, where the Liberal Party threatened to close down the Richmond injecting facility, which has stopped many persons living with drug addiction from dying. Some community groups and candidates threatened to run the centre underground.

So it might have to be in Tasmania. But there is, of course, a chance that humanity and health concerns will prevail. If the Department of Health and Tasmania Police were to allow pill testing to occur at the forthcoming Falls Festival, for example, then the callousness and stupidity of the Hodgman Government and the ALP could be overcome.

It would mean ignoring Michael Ferguson, the highly conservative Health Minister who is, like the late Nancy Reagan, a fan of the simplistic and futile “just say no’’ message. And Tasmania Police would merely have to make public what most of their members think anyway — that pill testing is a necessity and much more effective than dogs and searches.

We have not heard from the Falls Festival promoters as to their view of pill testing, but one could not imagine they are opposed given the high risk of a death or serious harm that has been inflicted on them courtesy of the ALP and Liberal Party last week.

What we do know is that Mona, the art gallery, supports pill testing. Its consistently liberal creative director Leigh Carmichael said its Mofo music festivals need pill testing. He rightly shamed

politicians for playing games with the issue — as did a number of medical professionals, the Australian Lawyers Alliance (disclaimer: this columnist is a spokesperson for the alliance) and rational members of the community.

So what is to be done? Given the abject failure, yet again, of politicians in Tasmania to see drug use as a health issue, it is up to those who are genuinely concerned to put harm minimisation first to simply get on with the job.

Dare the politicians. Establish pill testing facilities at music festivals and dare the politicians to close it down.

Oh, but, say the fools who oppose pill testing, this is giving a green light to drug taking. Leaving aside the sickening hypocrisy of politicians who take donations from tobacco, gaming and alcohol companies on the one hand but condemn party drugs on the other, such a claim is manifestly wrong.

Young people, as noted above, take drugs. They do despite the billions of dollars spent on yawningly dull campaigns telling them not to do it. And they do not need pill testing facilities to encourage them to take more.

Pill testing legislation is not complex. The Greens’ proposal was workable and sensible. If politicians put lives and health first they would have passed it last week, and the more enlightened members of the Legislative Council such as Ruth Forrest and Rob Valentine would have seen it voted on positively before Christmas.

Perhaps the last word on why pill testing is sensible policy comes from the Australian Medical Association Tasmanian president Stuart Day, who said last week: “Pill testing provides an opportunity for early intervention, an appropriately trained professional talking to festival goers and providing them with information about what they are taking,

“The model that has been used overseas, and will likely be trialled in Australia, means that people have access to a doctor in a tent with other clinicians, chemists, counsellors and peer educators.”

Not that hard really, is it?

Hobart barrister Greg Barns is a human rights lawyer who has advised state and federal Liberal governments.