What do we want? DRUG TESTING! When do we want it? NOW!

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What do we want? DRUG TESTING! When do we want it? NOW!

The sun is shining, school’s out, the holidays are coming up and festival season has well and truly kicked off throughout Australia. Many of us are preparing for big weekends and even bigger recoveries, trying to avoid sunburn, #shreddingforstereo and readying our bodies for those sticky nights in stickier tents.

There’s no point denying it: chances are that a lot more people will be using recreational drugs over the next two or three months than the rest of the year. Some people act more responsibly than others – managing their intake, keeping hydrated, ensuring that they get something that resembles sleep in the middle there. Others are a little more reckless, or just downright stupid. Unfortunately, fatalities are not out of the question, as we’ve already seen this year with the tragic death of 19-year-old Georgina Bartter at Harbourlife earlier this month.

The fact of the matter is that some people do enjoy recreational drugs. But in order to take drugs, you need to buy them first. Many refer to the process itself as difficult, frustrating and ultimately quite expensive, but the biggest risk of all is that you never know what you’re getting. You don’t know if what you’re getting is exactly what you want, or if you’re going to end up hallucinating when you wanted a high, buzzing for days when you wanted to chill, suddenly being severely ill, winding up in hospital, or worse.

We’re aware, now, that a shockingly huge percentage of the drugs going around are tainted with harmful chemicals and all sorts of things that we shouldn’t ingesting. But many people take them anyway.  I guess that whole, “it’ll never happen to me” mentality is pretty strong. As is peer pressure, among many other reasons.

Additionally, we’ve been misinformed to a ridiculous level about drugs. The police stance on drug use is, in a nutshell, “If you take drugs you will die.”

But this just isn’t true. It really isn’t. It never has been and it never will – so why are we told this? Has scaremongering helped? No. The fact that they choose to have such a ridiculously broad outlook does nothing other than make it meaningless.
It’s not the drugs that are killing you. Tainted drugs, and no way of knowing that they’re tainted, might kill you though.

(By the way, don’t forget the myriad statistics showing how much higher the alcohol-related injuries, illnesses and deaths are than drug-related. Not that this justifies anything, but it has never ceased to amaze me as to why the police, government and media are so keen to intensely over-exaggerate and under-explain the bad effects of drugs, while ignoring alcohol.)

What angers me the most is that you then get officials like Inspector Stewart Leggat of City Central Local Area Command saying stuff like, “There’s little to no quality control in the production of illicit drugs. Quite simply, you don’t know what you are getting.”

So….. aren’t you going to do something about it? Because, while there is little to no quality control, the fact that you don’t know what you’re getting can change, very easily.

Earlier this year we wrote about roving drug-testing crew The Bunk Police, who are forced to smuggle their kits into festivals because of the RAVE act, or Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act, which essentially says that the existence of drug test kits implies that drug use is happening, and that isn’t on. We don’t have this law here, so why aren’t we doing anything about it?

We need drug testing. We need readily available kits and booths set up. We need information and education and a way to know what we’re taking or buying.

For now, you can buy them online here and here among others, and hopefully some time soon, we’ll see them readily available at the events and times they’re needed the most.

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