Of all the conflicts that the United States embarked upon in the past 100 years, President Richard Nixon's war on drugs – launched in June 1971 – was arguably the most futile. The aim was to reduce the illegal trade in drugs by criminalising their production, sale, possession and consumption. An army law enforcement agency equipped with all the resources the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation on earth could muster was enlisted to reinforce this prohibition. However, for all the national treasure expended and the millions of lives lost or blighted, the war has achieved little. Estimates of the size of the US's illicit drug trade are far from precise, but it's estimated that users spend in the order of $100 billion annually, sustaining and enriching large criminal organisations inside and outside the country.
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One of the more pernicious aspects of Mr Nixon's crusade was the pressure he and other officials brought to bear on foreign governments to follow US thinking on prohibitions. Unsurprisingly, Australia obliged, if without quite the same zealousness that has seen US jails fit to bursting with people convicted of relatively trivial offences.
Nearly 45 years on, belief in the effectiveness of heavily policed drug prohibition regimes has all but collapsed, even in parts of the US. Evidence-based policies emphasising harm minimisation, drug treatment, and the decriminalisation of small amounts of cannabis for personal use are recognised almost universally as the approaches most likely to minimise the harmful, addictive effects of illicit drugs. But in certain government and law enforcement circles (including in Australia, disappointingly) attitudes to drug law reform remain hostile.
The hostility of the NSW government towards the concept of drug-checking laboratories at music festivals is but the latest manifestation of this recalcitrance. Pill-testing stations have become an almost routine feature of European music festivals, allowing patrons to test (anonymously) the purity of ecstasy tablets. Ecstasy, or MDMA, is the drug of choice for party and concert-goers because it heightens perceptions of colour and sound, among other things. One of the drug's side effects, however, is extremely high body temperatures that can lead to under or over-hydration and, in some cases, death. A National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre report in 2010 estimated that ecstasy was involved in nearly 100 deaths in Australia between 2000 and 2008, about a dozen each year.
Many of these deaths have been at music festivals – seven in the past 12 months alone – and concerts now feature big police contingents, complete with drug sniffer dogs. The dogs have been successful in sniffing out potential ecstasy users, but the overall effectiveness of a strong police presence remains a matter of dispute. It's claimed concert-goers can and do ingest their pills before they get to the festival venue, and additionally that the dogs are an unwelcome intrusion at otherwise peaceful and well-behaved events.
Allowing festival-goers to test their pills for potency or to ascertain whether they have been contaminated with toxic chemicals seems a perfectly sensible idea. Most ecstasy tablets are manufactured in China and sold on the black market, meaning buyers have no idea whatever about their potency or purity. Logically, anyone in possession of pills shown to be adulterated or of super potency would be unlikely to consume them.
Among those pushing for the introduction of drug-testing laboratories is Canberra physician David Caldicott, who argues that they would save lives and, by educating young people about the prevalence of tainted drugs, perhaps reduce consumption. And Dr Caldicott has also vowed that he'd be prepared to help run a trial. This week, however, NSW Premier Mike Baird reaffirmed his government's opposition to pill testing, rejecting the safety objectives and suggesting that festival-goers abstain from drug-taking to ensure their safety.
Mr Baird's failure to endorse pill testing is depressing, the more so since he generally espouses progressive views on other social issues. And the disconnect raises the strong suspicion he's been swayed by NSW Police. They are the last authority on crime strategy, but for the NSW force to insist on the primacy of prohibition is self-serving and dishonest – if they were doing their jobs properly, ecstasy would be unavailable on the streets.
The Premier has done festival-goers and himself a disservice by cleaving to drug policies that were never successful, are now thoroughly discredited, and which should be junked in favour of more sensible and enlightened strategies.
