Moves to hold Australia’s first pill testing trial are welcome but way behind the curve, public health advocates say.
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According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, pill testing was taking place in the Netherlands as early as 1992, before the idea spread to other countries.
Pill testing is a harm minimisation strategy, which tests illicit substances to identify the presence of toxic contaminants.
The central idea of pill testing is that this information allows users to make better decisions about whether to take drugs or not.
Family Drug Support chief executive Tony Trimingham described the proposal to offer pill testing at Canberra’s Groovin the Moo festival on Sunday as a “no brainer”.
“For many years I’ve supported the idea,” he said.
“Long before it was even remotely suggested in Australia it has been happening in Europe with no major problems.”
The pill testing concept has not been without controversy, and critics argue that it encourages the use of harmful and illegal substances.
The territory government first gave STA-SAFE permission to test drugs at the Spilt Milk festival at Canberra's Commonwealth Park in November last year but the trial was shelved just weeks out from the event.
While the promoter claimed it was a problem with paperwork, the local branch of the Liberal party was accused of "sabotaging" the trial by calling on their federal colleagues to intervene.
Public Health Association chief executive Michael Moore said pill testing was a “pragmatic” measure.
“I do understand why people have doubts,” he said.
“We would all prefer if young people didn’t use illicit drugs. But that’s not the reality.
“This is a pragmatic approach to an issue that does put lives in danger.”
Pill testing studies have been run in European countries such as Austria, Belgium, France and Germany.
A covert pill testing trial in New Zealand in 2017 prompted then-Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne to call for the measure to be legalised.
The science behind pill testing has become more sophisticated.
Basic early tests with limited accuracy would dissolve substances in chemical reagents, causing a colour change that would indicate the presence of a particular contaminant.
But other tests such as mass spectrometry have become more accessible and cheaper to run in recent years.
Mass spectrometry uses a small scraping to provide high accuracy readings of the different substances contained in a pill and relative concentrations of these substances.
ACT Health said pill testing at Groovin the Moo would be undertaken using a mobile laboratory.
“Services staff test a small sample of received pills, then interpret and provide the results with information about the risk of consuming the substances identified in the sample," a spokesman said.
"The testing will be conducted by highly trained analysts using state-of-the-art equipment."
