Pill testing acknowledged the simple reality that Australians use illicit drugs, she said, pointing to data that shows more than 1 million Australians used cocaine in the past 12 months.
“There’s huge numbers of people using all sorts of different drugs. The ‘just say no to drugs’ approach hasn’t worked, and does not work,” said Schumann, who heads the drug intelligence unit at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.
The bill to allow a pill-testing trial will be introduced to the Victorian parliament on Tuesday.Credit: Paul Rovere
“We need to be realistic and acknowledge some people are going to use drugs. And there are ways we can cut the harms associated with that.”
Mental Health Minister Ingrid Stitt described the policy as “common sense”.
“The evidence is clear pill testing reduces harm and save lives, and we have acted swiftly since announcing our plans to have services ready for the next festival season,” Stitt said.
How pill testing works
The exact design of Victoria’s pill-testing strategy is not yet complete. Schumann said it would likely centre on two technologies: FTIR and liquid chromatography.
Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) works by hitting a sample with infrared light.
“The substances will be excited by the particular wavelengths. And then they’ll retransmit the light – what bounces back will have the signature of the molecule,” said Dr Ian Musgrave, a molecular pharmacologist at the University of Adelaide.
Mental Health Minister Ingrid Stitt described the drug testing trial as “common sense”. Credit: Jason South
That light signature can then be run against a database of known drug signatures, allowing for quick identification of the chemical contents.
FTIR is quick, but has some limitations: principally it cannot detect chemical traces lower than about 5 per cent. If the drug is an impure mixture of multiple low-quality compounds, identification can be very difficult: a trial of a machine at the Groovin the Moo festival in Canberra was unable to identify 53 per cent of samples.
Liquid chromatography can fill this gap. The technology is more accurate, but it takes several days to get an analysis done. Schumann said that in some countries, some drug-users head to the service before attending a music festival.
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