You can't blame NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, for wanting to shut down Defqon.1, the Penrith music festival that attracted more than 30,000 fans from around the country, after the tragic, and potentially avoidable, deaths of two people on Saturday night.
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Medical services were stretched to the limit. An estimated 700 partygoers sought assistance at the first aid-centre and NSW ambulance officers had to deal with three people, two of whom died, going into cardiac arrest almost simultaneously.
Saturday's grim tally brought the number of deaths at Defqon.1 to four in just five years.
"I feel so sorry for the parents of the people who have died," Tony Wood, an anti-drugs campaigner who lost her 15-year-old daughter, Anna, to ecstasy at a Sydney dance party in 1995, said. "Grief is a constant thing. It never goes away."
So, in this context, Ms Berjiklian's impulse to shut down the event in the name of public safety is likely to win widespread support. But does that make it the right thing to do?
Prohibition, criminalisation and "black letter" law enforcement have a poor track record on preventing drug abuse and drug deaths.
If this, and all similar events, were banned it is probable unauthorised, unregistered, and unpoliced parties would start popping up all across the country.
They would, by definition, be far less safe on many levels than legal events which have to comply with copious amounts of red tape.
A far more sensible approach, and one which Ms Berejiklian appears to have rejected out of hand, would be to go down the harm minimisation route through allowing drug testing.
Her claim that: "...anyone who advocates pill testing is giving the green light to drugs..." is demonstrably wrong if the lessons learned from Australia's first pill testing trial at Canberra's "Groovin the Moo" in April are anything to go by.
While about half of the pills tested were found to be duds concocted from substances such as lactose, paint, toothpaste and condensed milk, the other half did contain MDMA.
Two of the tablets were potentially deadly with one containing a substance linked to a mass hospitalisation in New Zealand in March and the other containing a substance linked to three deaths in Melbourne last year.
None of the 128 people who had drugs tested was among those who later required medical treatment.
This is the clearest Australian proof to date that putting medical professionals in contact with individuals about to use drugs can change minds and save lives.
It is not about giving a drug the stamp of legitimacy; it is about creating an opportunity for a crucial conversation on risk at the right place and the right time.
"Many of the patrons initially thought a product that contained MDMA of high purity was a success," STA-Safe consortium member and Canberra emergency physician, Dr David Caldicott, said after Groovin the Moo. "We were able to disabuse them of that... the purer an MDMA product is, the more likely you are to overdose on it."
This is the sort of message festival goers need to hear when they have a potentially lethal pill in their hand and a life-changing decision to make. Why deny it to them, when the tough on drugs approach has found to be an abject failure?