Stayin’ alive
Generally, the young people who turn up at the KnowYourStuff tent at a festival aren’t regular users. What they want is to have a recreational experience with drugs at festivals maybe two or three times a year.
The volunteer group’s first principle is that the safest approach is not to take drugs. “That’s literally the first thing we say to our clients,” Allison says.
“Most people grow out of this behaviour. We just want to help them stay alive so they get the chance.”
The evidence is that if the drugs they have tested are not what they are purported to be – either because they’re adulterated or simply another substance altogether – about two-thirds of people will decide not to take them, many choosing to put them in the disposal jar to be destroyed. Those who persist are told about the risks and appropriate dosage.
Volunteers make sure medics at the event are briefed on what sorts of drugs are circulating so they can treat any patients appropriately.
After the Rhythm and Vines interception in January, Police Minister Stuart Nash said he would like to see testing at all festivals this coming summer. That isn’t looking likely. For a start, KnowYourStuff has only three spectrometers, the instrument needed to identify drug constituents. But the main obstacle is that the service is operating in a legal grey area. The Misuse of Drugs Act makes it a crime for an event organiser to knowingly provide a venue for the taking of illegal drugs, and having testing facilities onsite acknowledges that drugs are being used. For this reason, high-profile events such as Rhythm and Vines, which last year attracted 21,000 people, aren’t prepared to take the risk of having a testing service until it is legal.
After Listen In last month, Auckland Stadiums director James Parkinson told the NZ Herald organisers had considered inviting KnowYourStuff to the event. “However, these drugs are illegal substances and are prohibited items in our venues. The concept of testing and returning illegal substances to patrons places us, as a venue operator, in a very difficult legal position.”
Allison says the idea that drugs are “handed back” is a persistent misconception. The organisation’s volunteers never handle the drugs being tested – a tiny sample is placed for testing by the person holding them. It is destroyed as part of testing.
Following an inquest into the deaths of six young people at music festivals in New South Wales in the past two summers, the state’s deputy coroner, Harriet Grahame, has called for the introduction of pill testing and a move away from hard-line policing tactics, such as strip-searching and drug dogs. The deaths were all attributed to “MDMA toxicity or complications of MDMA use”, though five of the six had other drugs in their system.
Interim testing on cards
Here, the Government is understood to be considering an interim programme of drugs testing this summer, which would be supervised and/or run by a team of qualified researchers. The exercise would be monitored to provide data, including on the incidence of adulteration, the willingness of potential drug-takers to seek a test of their drugs and the percentage of those who chose not to take the drugs after advice from the on-site tester.
That data would be used to develop a permanent testing strategy, if the programme showed it had the potential to be effective.
New Zealand First has been reluctant to sanction on-site testing because its policy is not to liberalise drug laws. It has expressed concern that on-site testing would encourage more drug-taking. However, after a close vote at its annual party conference last month in favour of testing, the caucus has reconsidered the issue, and may accept an interim testing regime. Its youth wing made a strong case in favour of urgent testing intervention, arguing it was not a signal that drug-taking was okay, but quite the opposite.
The party may also recognise the political risk of being seen to block the Government taking at least interim action, given the likelihood of further incidents this summer.
National is adamantly against festival drug-testing, saying the best harm-reduction policy is to discourage drugs, full stop. Its drugs law spokesperson, Brett Hudson, says any festival testing regime would be bound to be read as further evidence that taking drugs is okay, and that police will turn a blind eye. He says the simple message, “Don’t”, is still the best.
In the meantime, KnowYourStuffNZ is getting ready for the biggest night of the year, New Year’s Eve, and says she expects to have a team out somewhere in New Zealand every weekend this summer.
“We would like to move to a user-pays model so events would pay for the service, as they do with Portaloos and security, then cover it with the ticket price. But for that to happen, what we do has to be explicitly legal and section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act is getting in the way. We want this law clarification to happen before someone dies.”
This article was first published in the November 23, 2019 issue of the New Zealand Listener.
