As the Australian Capital Territory government again refuses to fund pill testing at music festivals, a new ad is shedding light on exactly what kids go through and why so many of them are diving in blind.

The ad has been written by Dylan Harrison for Pill Testing Australia, an organisation that conducts pill testing, and comes as a new report has claimed potentially up to seven lives were saved at a single festival following the procedure being offered.

The new ad shows a young boy nervously sitting at the edge of a cliff while his mates jump and flip into the water below.

The teen is already hesitating when one of his friends, who has already jumped off the cliff, approaches him.

“It’s all good man, you don’t have to. It’s OK to be a pussy,” his friend tells him.

Facing the peer pressure, the teen starts to curl his toes over the edge of the cliff when a woman in a lab coat appears next to him.

“You gonna test that before you jump in?” she asks.

“Well I can’t stop you but we might as well check what’s inside.”

It cuts to the teen at a festival walking into a pill testing tent and testing his drugs.

The short clip advocates for pill testing, comparing young Aussies diving blindly into water as taking a pill with an unknown substance.

The ad was released alongside Pill Testing Australia’s (PTA) second report from Groovin The Moo in Canberra on April 28.

The advocacy group explained it will no longer be footing the hefty bill to provide the services but stated how it believed the machine had potentially saved lives.

PTA tested 170 substances for 234 revellers, finding seven of the samples contained N-Ethylpentylone, a highly toxic chemical blamed for festival drug deaths.

“This drug has been associated with deaths and mass casualty events in the USA and New Zealand,” the report read.

All seven festivalgoers that found they had N-Ethylpentylone in their pills threw them out.

While testing only 170 substances from the 20,000 festivalgoers might seem like a small percentage, it was double that of PTA’s pilot at Groovin The Moo in 2018.

Legally, the pill testing tent was unable to have any signage and was located in the medical area of Groovin The Moo, which the report suggested affected their participation numbers.

The average age of people testing their pills were 17 and 67 per cent of the MDMA the advocacy group tested were pure.

In a statement earlier today, the ACT government said it would not be forking out the money required to keep the pill testing idea running at next year’s Groovin The Moo.

The state’s health minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the government maintained the safest option was to “not take drugs”.

“The ACT government does not condone the use of illicit drugs, we know the safest option remains not to take drugs and this will always be our advice to the community.

“However, we also believe governments have a responsibility to not only try and prevent drug use but also to support initiatives that reduce the harms associated with drug use.

“This is why we have provided a supportive policy environment for the trials to take place in the ACT.”

The independent evaluation of the pill testing service is due for completion and release in late-2019, which the Territory’s government is waiting for before taking further action.

PTA has always maintained it can’t stop people taking pills but “we can reduce the harm”.

Using Switzerland as an example, it’s been reported that since the implementation of the pill testing service SaferParty in Zurich, there have been no ecstasy-related deaths.

In the UK in 2016, when festival drug-related incidents were at an highest, a pill testing service proved to reduce hospitalisations.

A pill testing tent at a UK festival in 2016 pushed drug-related hospitalisations from 19 in 2015 to one in 2016.

The pill testing team, labelled in the report as “one of the most qualified in the country”.

PTA has called on the ACT government to release funds for future tests at festivals in the Territory; the ACT government to negotiate with festival promoters over events where drug-related harm may be anticipated, and for the current issue of not displaying signage to test sites be addressed.

It has also urged all other state and territory governments around the country take up on PTA’s offer to hold one free test each to see if they should be held permanently and that all governments work together with the organisation and other harm minimisation organisations to set up a national public early warning system, including minimal harm group data be shared with medical staff at festivals to avoid possible disasters.