The pill-testing debate has exposed a faultline in Australian society: from drugs to fertility to drinking after-hours, people (particularly women) aren’t trusted to make decisions about our own bodies. Why won’t our authority figures let us grow up? Asks Anna Spargo-Ryan.
IN THE EARLY NOUGHTIES I went to a festival by the river to ring in the new year. To enhance the experience, I took a blue pill pressed with a dolphin. Twenty minutes later, my brain slid right out of my body and ran off, fractured and angry. My friends left me in the first aid tent with capable but unsympathetic paramedics – I was another reckless teenager taking pills I’d bought from a stranger.
Soon after that night, pill-testing stations started popping up at festivals. They were privately funded and fairly rudimentary, but they gave us more information than any government website had. We knew we couldn’t be certain the pill was safe, but we did get the chance to make a more informed choice and take control of what we did with our own bodies.
The 2019 festival “epidemic” saw the tragic deaths of six young people in Victoria and New South Wales. How might things have been different if they’d been offered another option? In the Netherlands, pill testing is part of a national drug policy. It’s available in countries like France, Belgium, and Spain, and non-profits have been offering the service in the US since 1999. Portugal has decriminalized all illicit drug possession and use, with the result that consumption by adolescents has decreased.
In Australia, policymakers mostly focus on discouraging pill testing, despite calls coming from the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians to allow it. A 2013 report by UNSW’s Professor Alison Ritter found that only 2.1 percent of the 2009–10 drugs budget was devoted to harm reduction (helping people to make informed decisions), while around 65 percent went to law enforcement.
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