Last weekend we again learned of another young person losing their life at a music festival due to a drug overdose from a dodgy pill. This is so sad and I send all my love and condolences to her family.
But again, we have this ridiculous public debate in the media with some of our so called leaders not even considering changing their stance and maintaining their non-support for pill testing. We are told that pill testing will encourage people to take drugs. Surely it’s pretty obvious that people, especially our younger people, will make a decision to take a drug or pill whether it could be tested or not. Whether its legal or not. It’s just something some of us will do. I find it incredulous that we would actually make ingesting a substance that may enhance your euphoria and experience of an event illegal, but I’ll leave my thoughts on the legality of drugs for another article.
All these kids really only want to do is get high and dance all night, what is the harm in that? Well the harm is that the substance they take may not be safe, so let’s try to make things as safe as possible. If we can allow injecting rooms for those people who chose to take a substance with a needle, surely we can have pill testing at music festivals. The pill testing experience can also be an opportunity to educate people on what they are intending to take and also enable a discussion if drugs are an issue for the person so they have an avenue to seek help if needed.
Our whole approach towards drugs and addiction for that matter, should be focused on harm minimisation, education and dealing with it as a health issue.
Pill testing may not save everyone’s life. Some people wishing to take a pill may not bother to get it tested. But if testing is available someone can find out exactly what they are about to ingest and probably more importantly find out if this pill is likely to kill them. If only one life is saved then we should do it.
I do note that pill testing has been available in the Netherlands from 1992, Belgium 1993, Austria 1997, Portugal, France, Spain, USA and Canada since 1999, Switzerland since 2001 and the UK since 2013. Its not a new thing.
Let’s get pill testing at our music events as soon as possible, before another young person needlessly loses their life.
concerned parent
The more ive considered this issue the more concerned ive become about pill testing. A scrape of one pill is not going to necessarily capture all the pills ingredients nor the batch it originated from. The one thing it will achieve though is a false sense of safety. If we are going to provide truly safe pills then they need to be manufactured under licence by the government and we remove the illegality of some pills. there is a radical and confrontational contribution for you!