Pill testing proponents need to go back to parallel universe they’re from

Apologies for sounding like a backward thinking grump in his 50s.

But all those so-called “experts” pushing for pill testing at music festivals should go and live in whatever parallel universe their brains came from.

We should be deeply troubled if our society has reached the point of sanctioning organised crime by officially analysing its product before handing the drug back to the user to consume at will.

To abandon a community’s cornerstone values of right and wrong is to surrender to the underworld merchants who have dished out death under the guise of euphoria.

Another cluster of music festival goers — some as old as 25 — were taken to hospital in NSW at the weekend for throwing responsibility out the window and popping pills at enormous risk.

I simply do not subscribe to the idea that it is up to governments around the country to put testing regimes in place to advise people that if they swallow their illicit drug it might kill them.

The risk is self-evident. There is no shortage of young faces whose lives were cut short by misadventure. Enough families have expressed grief over such futile loss of a loved one. The warnings are there. The danger is obvious.

Advocates of pill testing want the State to become a quality control service for drug syndicates making millions of dollars from their illegal trade.

The touchy-feely argument is that young people will take drugs regardless of all the warnings so governments should make sure they are safe at privately run music festivals.

“We bring you into the tent, a researcher talks to you about your pills and use, gives you some up-to-date info on the newer drugs out there and how to stay safe,” is how one Eastern States doctor explained the process of pill testing in 2016.

I can only assume that once the testing is complete and education session is over, the client is free to take the pill, or pills, head into the festival, get off their dial and possibly collapse from a combination of the drugs and exhaustion. Who is responsible then?

Premier Mark McGowan was on to the flaws in this counter-intuitive proposal when asked this month if he was prepared to introduce on-site pill testing.

“You hand a pill over and someone does some perfunctory test and says it’s OK,” the Premier said.

“It might be 40-degree heat and they might have a body weight of 45kg and they take that pill and how ever many others. I don’t think that’s a safe way of dealing with the situation.”

The tragedy of losing someone who wanted to dance all day on drugs is bad enough. Imagine if you discovered after the death, or near-death, that the pills were given the green light by a government-approved testing station?

Madness.

As is often the case, Europe is the benchmark for the backers of pill testing. Countries such as Spain and France gave up trying to stop people from doing the wrong thing so they opted to make illegal drug use less dangerous.

The availability and purity of ecstasy or MDMA in Europe has never been higher, according to a 2016 report by the European Union’s drug monitoring and addiction unit.

“In recent years, signals from both formal and informal monitoring sources based in a number of countries have been flagging critical new developments within Europe’s MDMA/ecstasy market,” the report said.

“These include signs of increased MDMA production and availability, the opening of new online markets, reports of increased use, the issuing of alerts on both high-dose MDMA tablets and adulterated tablets, and evidence of low but potentially rising numbers of MDMA-related hospital admissions, and even deaths in some countries.”

No doubt one of the pro-testing advocates will have data to counter that, but the main reason I have for taking an anti-testing stance has nothing to do with statistics.

As a parent you teach your kids about the harm of taking pills because the original source would be unknown and the manufacturing process concealed and potentially lethal. You stress the responsibility they must take for their actions. No government should be able to dilute that message by telling young people that their party pills are good to go.