Just before New Years punters heading to Falls Festival received this text: "SERIOUS DRUG ALERT: There is an extremely dangerous orange pill in circulation. Regardless of pill variation, one pill can kill.

In a statement, Falls said its "medical teams" had alerted it to "a dangerous orange pill that was currently in circulation across Australia."

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The early warning may have saved lives, but it also raised a lot of questions: what about people who weren't going to Falls; shouldn't they be warned? How did the medical teams learn about the orange pills? Is there a private database of dangerous pills? If the medical team knew, shouldn't authorities be warning the general public?

While Australia endlessly debates whether or not to approve pill testing, (believe us, this comes up every summer), it's worth remembering such a trial would be only the start: Countries with the most experience of pill testing also have networks of fixed testing stations and early warning systems.

If pill testing goes ahead in Australia, it's likely similar systems and networks would eventually follow.

This could involve an official pill reports website, warning notices at testing depots, and televised alerts about dangerous batches.

It also might not necessarily involve pill testing at festivals.

"You don't want festivals to be the only place where you get drugs tested," Tim Powell from Students for Sustainable Drug Policy told Hack.

Having sites outside of festivals that are accessible means you don't have to buy festival tickets to get lab-grade results.

Johnboy Davidson, owner and administrator of pillreports.net, (a popular website that publishes user's pill testing results), told Hack the focus on festival pill testing was "wrongheaded".

"I think the system being done in the Netherlands is far superior," he said.

"We need to get those people who are distributing to friends. We need to get dangerous pills out of those people's hands immediately and find them before they're distributed.

"It just has to be done that way to be effective."

How it works in the Netherlands

The Drugs and Information Monitoring System (DIMS) in the Netherlands is commonly regarded as the world's best drug early warning system.

In 1992, the Dutch Minister of Health decided to fund the first drug-checking system in Europe. It is a nationwide system of 31 stationary testing facilities where you can anonymously bring your drug sample to be tested. This allows DIMS to monitor the Dutch illicit-drug market and take action when there is a major public health risk.

DIMS also feeds into the European early warning system, which allows authorities to track market trends across the continent.

The test sample is matched against a database of over 70,000 substances to identify both psychoactive drugs and toxic contaminants.

The DIMS website might warn that a green Heineken shaped pill contains 70 per cent MDMA, 20 per cent concrete powder, and 10 per cent rat poison. It can also warn what the likely effects of consuming this specific substance will be.

Dr Daan van der Gouw from the Trimbos Institute, which operates DIMS on behalf of the Dutch government, told Hack the lack of festival testing "is not really a bad thing".

"We test 12,000 samples every year," he said.

"That's much more than you would get at any festival."

"It's very effective, we're very well aware of what's going on in the market and we can inform drug users of potentially risky drugs that are appearing on the market."

The drug checking is one part and what's equally important is you communicate with drugs users about their drug use. This is done much better in a quiet office rather than when people are in a festive mood.

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Whatsapp The 25th edition of the Dutch dance festival Mysteryland, in Hoofddorp.

Members of the public can drop their drugs off at the testing facility, free of charge and anonymously. One week later they call and get the result.

"They're informed about the content of the tablet and, if it's a bit risky, we always say whatever you do don't take this tablet."

"Sometimes the outcomes are so disturbing we issue a national red alert campaign."

Does it work?

In late 2014, a DIMS laboratory detected a large lethal dose of a substance called PMMA in a batch of pills with a Superman logo.

The next morning, on December 19, it arranged for a televised alert in the Netherlands, warning members of the public about these pills.

In the UK, where there was no comparable early warning system at the time, punters were not warned about the Superman pills.

Five days after the Dutch government warned its residents, an unsuspecting man in the UK died from an overdose linked to the Superman pills.

Three more would die from the pills in the UK over the festive break.

In Australia, police began warning of the Superman-shaped pills around February 24, more than two months after the alert in the Netherlands.

Since the Superman pill deaths, the UK has stepped up its early warning system. A not-for-profit system, The Loop, sends out regular twitter warnings:

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What warning systems are there currently in Australia?

The lack of a warning system in Australia became apparent in the aftermath of the Chapel Street drug deaths in January 2017, when a bad batch of MDMA made it into Melbourne's southside clubs.

Twenty were hospitalised and three died.

In the weeks after, authorities failed to explain what actually happened, and why so many people were badly affected. The public did not know what substance had caused the deaths.

But an internal safety memo leaked to the media showed that police appeared to have tested the drug and identified dangerous psychoactive substances.

The memo was marked "not for public release". It had been drafted a week after the Chapel Street deaths. Police were accused of deliberately withholding potentially lifesaving information - the very opposite of an early warning system.

Drug harm minimisation advocate Dr Stephen Bright, an addiction expert at Edith Cowan University, told Hack this kind of specific substance information can save lives.

"It would be helpful to know what had caused the death - that would allow us to tailor some educational information about reducing further deaths," he said.

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Whatsapp Splendour in the Grass 2017 on July 23, 2017 in Byron Bay.

Dr Bright and others arranges for a sample of the bad batch to be sent to a lab in Barcelona for testing.

"By us getting the drugs tested overseas at a laboratory and confirming what was in them we were able to provide people with really good harm reduction information around how to minimise the potential effects," he said.

"Things like, in this case, helping people avoid overheating by providing ice packs, and ensuring they're in a quiet space with low stimulation."

The Australian Greens have proposed something like the Dutch model: after-hours community pill testing centres, and "an early warning system beyond the informal networks of individual pill users and local communities which currently exist."

The Parliamentary Budget Office has costed the scheme at $16 million over four years.

The policy does not have the backing of either major party.

'Ad hoc freelancers do it on the dark web level'

In the absence of official warning systems, punters currently rely on informal user-based sites such as pillreports.net, which can have hundreds of thousands of hits on busy days, according to its owner and administrator Johnboy Davidson.

The website publishes pill testing results submitted by members of the public.

When the Hack radio program covered pill testing on Tuesday, a listener texted that pillreports.net "has been keeping me and my friends safe for 10 years."

As useful as the site has been, Johnboy recognises its nothing like DIMS.

"There's nowhere in Australia where you can bring pills to get them tested," he said.

"We just rely on what people are doing."

Over the last couple years he's noticed fewer reports being posted, possibly because people are taking MDMA in powder form instead of pills.

Since one powder is indistinguishable from another, there's no point posting the results of drug tests online to warn others. He says that just demonstrates the need for easily accessible drug testing.

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Whatsapp Pill testing supporters gather at a rally outside Sydney Town Hall on January 19 2019.

Tim from the SSDP told Hack he knew of dark web pill testing services where you could send drugs to chemists that would then test and verify the product.

"There's a demand to know," he said.

"But right now there's these ad hoc freelancers that do it on the dark web level."

Dr Daan van der Gouw from the Trimbos Institute says the DIMS-model of drug checking will not entirely prevent drug deaths.

"Still the fact remains a safe drug doesn't exist," he said.

"Drug checking services are not about promoting drug use, because drug use will take place anyway.

"It's about a safer way of using drugs."