Police Fed Up With Drug Use at Rainbow Serpent Festival

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Police Fed Up With Drug Use at Rainbow Serpent Festival

Rainbow Serpent has wrapped up for another year, and despite the good times that ensued, local authorities are enjoying pointing the finger at the reoccurring topic of drug use.

Victoria Police took to Facebook earlier today, with an article captioned “Serpent set to be tamed” where they expressed their concerns with the event after making 4 arrests for drug trafficking, as well as 40 cautions to drivers who tested positive for drugs.

In their article, Inspector Bruce Thomas stated “every year we see the event take place, every year we raise our concerns and every year we are left picking up the pieces”. An interesting comment, however for a festival spanning up to 6 days with over 16,000 attendees, a total of four arrests doesn’t seem to be to many pieces they’re picking up, does it?

Well the people of Facebook don’t seem to think so, with the original post from Victoria Police attracting some quite aggravated comments against the article.

Comments include:

Owen Hall: 40 out of 16,000 attending that’s 0.0025 of the attending population and they were positive on trace amounts this does not mean they were actually affected by drugs whilst driving, it would be the same as someone showing up as .01 BAC. The police scare tactics and targeting of people is absolutely ridiculous and only leads to further negative outcomes, frankly the police costs of this operation could have been much better spent on educating the police.

Jack Sampson: and Victoria police regarding this –
” It was a miracle that no one was killed on our roads given the number of drug drivers departing from the festival. If police didn’t intervene, these drug drivers could have easily killed someone’s child, brother, sister or parent. ” You do know that you don’t even test for drug impairment on our roads only traces of drugs, so those drivers were as dangerous as you were driving to work that day.

Akubra Leone Wyonda: Last year a video surfaced of a police officer having a ball at Rainbow Serpent??? Yet now they want to tame it. Police need education that is relevant to the 21st century which is a drug taking society – not saying that people should be getting away with drug / drink driving but the system of onside drug testing has been scientifically proven to be flawed, marijuana can show up on a swab up to 48 hours after using. The organisers of Rainbow Serpent Festival did a stellar job by offering drug tests / BAC tests on the gate on the way out of the festival. This is just common police scare tactics and its absolutely ridiculous.

It certainly seems as though the Victoria Police didn’t have as much fun as one of their officer’s did last year at Rainbow Serpent Festival, with Insp. Thomas following on that “Something has to change… We know there are obvious economic benefits to hosting an event such as this in our community. But the question remains as to whether the risks to public safety outweigh the economic benefit. We intend to raise this discussion with both local government members and festival organisers at the annual event debrief.”

But just how bad are these results from Victoria Police in comparison to everyday drug, alcohol or even gambling issues in the community? Are the authorities (once again) being too hard on the festivals?

Let us know what you think, let’s open up the discussion!

 

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