Two 'deadly' samples found in pill-testing trial at Canberra music festival
Australia’s first pill-testing trial has been hailed as a “tremendous” success by the Australian Capital Territory’s chief health officer, police commissioner, paramedics and drug reform advocates. The trial screened out two potentially deadly samples and found that half the drugs tested at a Canberra music festival over the weekend contained no psychoactive substances at all.
Dr David Caldicott, an emergency doctor and ANU academic who supervised the trial at the Groovin the Moo festival on Sunday, said 128 participants and 85 samples had been tested, greatly exceeding organisers’ expectations.
Two samples were “red-flagged” for their potential lethality.
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Half of tested drug samples had no pyschoactive ingredients, but were made of other substances like toothpaste, milk powder, glue and paint, he said.
The majority of other samples were found to be high purity MDMA, known colloquially as ecstasy.
“Many of our patrons initially thought that a product that contained a high purity of MDMA was a success,” Caldicott said, “but we were able to disabuse them of that, because the purer an MDMA product is, the more likely you are to overdose on it.”
The ACT’s chief health officer, Prof Paul Kelly, joined Caldicott, the territory’s chief police officer, Justine Saunders, and Toby Keene, the presiding first aid and ambulance officer at the festival, in hailing the success of the trial at a Canberra press conference on Monday.
“It was very much a strong harm minimisation process within the remit of the national drug strategy,” Kelly said, adding that a raft of legal and public health complexities had been overcome to stage it.
Keene said medical officers treated 86 people at the festival – three went to hospital – and information from the pill-testers assisted paramedics in their treatment of intoxicated patients.
Saunders said police were pleased with how the trial proceeded.
“We all understand in terms of addressing the impact of drugs in our community, the solution is not to arrest our way out of it,” she said.
Saunders denied media suggestions that police had been stationed near the testing area and said they did not enter the pill-testing tent, but one man had been arrested elsewhere at the festival on drug charges. Personal use of illicit drugs is not illegal in the ACT, but supply is.
The trial was run by the the STA-Safe Consortium, a group of nongovernment organisations lead by Harm Reduction Australia.
STA-Safe member Matthew Noffs, who has campaigned for drug-checking at festivals since the 2014 ecstasy-related death of Sydney 19-yearold Georgina Barter, said his modest expectations of demand were shattered, with patrons queuing to use the service in the middle of the day.
“So, harm reduced. We did it,” Noffs said.
Drugs were tested by health professionals using an infrared spectrophotometer in a mobile laboratory in one of the festival’s health tents.
Participants were invited to dispose of their drugs in an amnesty bin afterwards.
Caldicott said five people disposed of their drugs after the testing, and up to 20% of participants said they were “considering” binning their drugs.
Caldicott said the testing found two highly toxic samples contained the “absolutely lethal” substance N-Ethylpentylone (ephylone) which has caused a number of overdoses internationally and has not been detected in Australia before.
Following a string of drug-related deaths at festivals in recent years, pill-testing has been pushed by drug reform advocates as an effective harm minimisation measure that
is used in 20 other countries.
On Thursday the ACT health minister, Meegan Fitzharris, made the last-minute announcement the government would permit the trial of pill-testing, following weeks of stalemate over the issue.
The festival was held on the grounds of the University of Canberra, which lent its support to the trial.
But it was opposed by the ACT opposition, with the shadow attorney general, Jeremy Hanson, telling the ABC last week the decision would promote drug use.
“I’m very concerned about the young people who are now going to be taking drugs under the misapprehension that these drugs are safe, and the consequences and the harm that’s being done to them,” Hanson said.
But on Monday, Caldicott said that the opportunity for getting good drug education to recreational users who usually had little contact with health authorities or police was the most important aspect of the trial.
“We were able to interact with 128 young people who presented to us determined and convinced they would take drugs … and we can change their behaviour. That is the purpose of drug testing,” he said.
“Showing them … that they had glue or hairspray, I think that was a wake-up call.”
Kelly said that there would be a formal evaluation, but he expected pill-testing would continue in the ACT. The trial will not be repeated at Groovin the Moo’s other national dates.
A similar proposal for a drugchecking facility at a 2017 festival in Canberra on federal governmentowned land fell through at the last minute despite initial approval by the ACT government.