NSW Premier announces festival testing trial after drug summit
Friday, 20 December 2024.
Protesters in support of pill testing. Sydney, January 19, 2019.
The long-awaited NSW Drug Summit has finally taken place, and NUAA (the organisation that publishes Users News) worked hard to make sure that voices of people with lived and living experience of illicit drug use were represented. While we won’t see the government’s final recommendations until early 2025, on December 19 NSW Premier Chris Minns announced a welcome step in the right direction — drug sample testing at festivals.
“No parent wants to be given the news that something has happened to their child at a music festival, and that they are now in an emergency department or worse. The trial has a clear purpose – to reduce harm and save lives,” he said.
While the phrase “pill testing” is used to describe the service, powders, liquids and crystalline substances can also be tested. However, cannabis, mushrooms and other organic matter cannot be tested.
NUAA and other advocates for evidence-based drug policy have long pushed for this reform. Unexpected adulterants and unknown purity of substances are one of the main reasons for harm associated with illicit drug use and the past year has seen an increase in detection of nitazenes contaminating various illicit drugs.
NSW lags behind other states on this issue. The ACT and Queensland already have fixed site drug checking services as well as festival-based services, while Victoria has started testing at festivals this summer and will open a fixed testing site in mid-2025. The evidence from these services is that drug checking reduces harm.
While taking drugs at music festivals is a popular pastime in Australia, festivals don’t happen all the time and most illicit drug use happens elsewhere, which is why NUAA is hoping that this trial will lead to permanent, fixed-site drug checking services, in Sydney and regional towns, so that all illicit drug users can know what they’re using and make informed choices.
Drug Summit
The Summit consisted of regional sessions held in Griffith and Lismore in November, and a 2-day session in Sydney on December 4 and 5.
It was described as a “participatory democracy” process although some participants from the community reported that it was difficult to get a handle on the details of the process before, and even during, the Summit, with the format shifting in response to feedback from meeting to meeting.
“At the first day in Griffith, there appeared to be relatively little representation from people with lived or living experience of illicit drug use and NUAA advocated strongly for more inclusion in subsequent meetings. The Ministry listened to our concerns and representation in Sydney was much stronger,” NUAA CEO Mary Harrod said.
Several NUAA employees and volunteers were at the Sydney event, from across a range of NUAA program areas including NSP, Nepean Blue Mountains Aboriginal Peer Project, Advocacy, Outreach and DanceWize NSW, and ensured that a diverse range of voices of people with lived and living experience of drug use were heard.
The Griffith and Lismore Summit days had panel discussions followed by group discussions (morning and afternoon) on each of the 5 themes. Each discussion was moderated and transcribed. There was reporting back after the discussion with a couple of reporting mechanisms tested with mixed success. The first day of the Sydney Summit consisted of scene-setting speakers and a panel followed by 2 group discussions with participants able to nominate 2 topics for discussion.
Day 2 also began with a number of speakers and then sessions on each of the 5 priority areas. These sessions had a panel and were presented with a summary of potential actions from the previous 3 days of discussion with the aim of arriving at 5 top priorities.
“It was a big 4 days,” NUAA CEO Mary Harrod said. “The Summit did have some real strengths. It was possible to really engage with people that you may never have had the opportunity to speak to previously. There were senior members of the NSW Police Force at all 4 days and in Griffith and Lismore they were very accessible and quite a few community members were able to share their views – for example, a Police Superintendent from Sydney had a long discussion with the President of the Nimbin Hemp Embassy. It was possible to informally chat with senior members of the NSW Government and everyone was able to put forward their views very directly.
“The weakness of the event was the lack of transparency. It was unclear how the takeaways from the discussions were arrived at. The other key weakness was a lack of representation, particularly from Aboriginal Communities. The Day 1 speakers who set the scene in Sydney did not have any Aboriginal representation at all, with NUAA Board member Associate Professor Michael Doyle from the University of Sydney being pulled into the panel discussion at the very last minute. This frustration overwhelmed the discussion in the Equity and Inclusion session on the final day.”
Priorities
The discussion was broken down into 5 themes:
• Health Promotion and Well-being
• Safety and Justice
• Keeping Young People Safe and Supporting Families
• Integrated Support and Social Services
• Equity and Inclusion
The final day included a session that decided on 5 priority areas from each of the themes.
Despite calls for reforms to drug laws from summit participants, the Premier and Minister for Health remain against full decriminalisation, having stated before the event that they had no mandate for such a reform. There is strong appetite from both the community and within Police to improve diversion schemes such as EDDI (early drug diversion initiative) and youth courts.
The priority areas identified by participants for each of the 5 themes were:
Health promotion and wellbeing
• Legislate to reform use and possession of drugs for personal use
• Introduce drug checking services
• Increase place based local services that build community capacity and connection
• Enable more supervised injecting facilities (SIFs) by removing the legislative restriction to one facility in NSW
• Enhance funding for prevention and early intervention programs
• Expand peer workforce across the spectrum of AOD services, including Aboriginal peer workforce
• Increase funding for AOD treatment services including detox and post-treatment support services
Safety and justice
• Decriminalise drug use and possession
• Introduce drug checking services
• Stop the use of drug detection dogs at music festivals and in public spaces
• Stop strip searches for suspected drug possession
• Review of EDDI including: enhanced eligibility, removing police discretion, consistency between EDDI and the Cannabis Cautioning Scheme and a clear evaluation framework
Keeping young people safe and supporting families
• Introduce drug checking services
• Improve cross-agency partnerships, including wraparound services and coordination between health, mental health, education and Justice supports
• Enhance access to treatment and support for children and young people
• Address stigma and improve families and young people's access to services and support
• Increase co-design of services with young people and peer workforce
Integrated support and social services
• Deliver a whole-of-government strategy focusing on AOD as a health issue
• Adequately fund existing AOD services to meet demand
• Integration and co-location of AOD services with other health services (e.g., mental health, dental and primary care)
• Strengthen collaboration across sectors, including GPs, NGOs, and community services
• Fund long-term, outcome-focused models to improve workforce retention and service stability
• Address barriers to service access though increased investment in housing, prioritising housing-first models and transport
Equity and inclusion
Participants in this session reported that the solutions presented did not adequately describe the feedback that had been provided and criticised the process for not meaningfully engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, young people, multicultural communities and LGBTQ+ communities. As a result, the session did not identify priorities for the theme.
What happens next?
The Summit Co-Chairs will write the final report and for the NSW Government early in the new year. The government has been urged to act quickly and commence the development of a Drug Strategy immediately.
“What is clear is that the community is fed up with Inquiries and wants real action. The call for greater transparency was also quite clear,” Harrod said.
While it would be unrealistic to expect the government to enact every reform called for by people with lived or living experience of drug use, the government’s announcement about festival drug sample checking shows that if we raise our voices loud enough, we can get positive results.
Hopefully it will be followed by other steps that reduce harm, risk, stigma and discrimination. But for this to happen, we must continue using every opportunity to keep raising our voices.