The smell of marijuana was overwhelming.

As I peered into the wheelie bin, I could see bags and bags of weed, pills, crystals and powders.

The bin was almost full of drugs.

It was carefully wheeled into the police compound to a mobile testing unit, out of reach of the crowds at Boomtown Fair, one of the biggest festivals in the UK.

As I watched this "back-of-house" drug testing unit in action, I wondered if this could be a solution to the political stalemate in Australia.

A deadly cycle

Reporter Tom Tilley at Boomtown. ( Foreign Correspondent )

A tragic spate of six drug-related deaths at festivals in NSW has pushed the pill testing debate into overdrive this year.

After years of covering festival drug deaths on triple j, I've witnessed the same cycle every festival season.

First, a young person dies in the prime of their life at a music festival.

Then, the shock and sadness.

Next, the pill testing advocates speak out.

Lastly, our political leaders say pill testing will give a green light to drug use.

Young people continue using drugs and the spotlight turns off, until the next tragic death.

Cue cycle again.

Boomtown has embraced "back-of-house" drug testing. ( Foreign Correspondent: Winsome Denyer )

For the past two years, the ACT has been the only state or territory to move forward on this issue.

It allowed pill testing trials to go ahead at Canberra's Groovin' the Moo festival in 2018 and 2019.

The ACT Health Minister deemed the trials a success, but so far this hasn't led any other states to follow suit.

This week, the NSW Coroner's Court holds its final hearings into the six festival deaths. While that inquest has been running, I've been doing my own investigation.

'Front-of-house' at Boomtown

Inside Broomtown Fair. ( Foreign Correspondent )

As the European festival season kicked off over the northern summer, I travelled to the UK and Switzerland to see two different approaches to pill testing in action.

Set in the rolling fields near Winchester, the UK's Boomtown Fair Festival this year hosted 66,000 people for a five-day medieval psychedelic wonderland.

Along with the colour, Boomtown Fair has a tragic past. From 2011 to 2016, four people died there from drug-related causes.

In response, Boomtown changed its approach, embracing "front-of-house" drug testing.

Front-of-house testing is controversial because festival goers can take their drugs to a tent in the middle of the festival and local police agree not to arrest them.

The Loop, a non-profit organisation, ran this service at Boomtown in 2017 and 2018, testing hundreds of samples per day.

In those two years, no-one died at Boomtown.

The Loop found 44 per cent of users said they reduced their dose or discarded their drugs after receiving feedback and counselling. Last year, The Loop tested at six other festivals across the UK.

The Loop drug safety tent, where Boomtown revellers had access to drugs counselling this year. ( Foreign Correspondent: Winsome Denyer )

But while the Foreign Correspondent team and I were on the way to the UK, we got some bad news — The Loop wouldn't be testing at Boomtown this year.

It had been operating in a legal grey area, relying on an agreement with local police and authorities.

This year for the first time, The Loop applied for a licence with the UK government, a process which is ongoing.

In the meantime, The Loop wasn't able to secure the necessary agreements with local authorities in time. As an alternative, it provided a drug counselling service.

Testing behind the scenes

Trevor Shine, director of drug testing company Tictac. ( Foreign Correspondent: Winsome Denyer )

While The Loop's front-of-house testing service attracted headlines, testing was also happening quietly at Boomtown since 2017. We decided to take a closer look.

Deep in the police compound, far from the partygoers, we were escorted into a mobile drug testing lab run by a private company, Tictac.

The company has a government licence to handle illicit drugs for testing. Tictac also tests at Glastonbury, the UK's biggest music festival.

Every day, Boomtown's security team brought in a wheelie bin full of drugs that had been confiscated at the gate or placed voluntarily into amnesty bins.

Wearing rubber gloves, the chemists took out huge quantities of ecstasy, MDMA crystals, ketamine, cocaine and pungent marijuana.

Good times at Boomtown. ( Foreign Correspondent )

Using hi-tech equipment, the Tictac team began testing the drugs and comparing the samples to their extensive database.

If the back-of-house testing team finds any dangerous substances, it alerts the organisers, who put out an alert to festival goers, welfare and medical teams.

Throughout the five days of Boomtown, Tictac found samples that contained two dangerous substances: PMMA and N-ethylpentylone.

These substances are often mis-sold as MDMA but have a different effect and have been linked to fatalities.

When it found those substances, Tictac alerted the Boomtown Drug and Crime team who used onsite signage, social media and the festival's phone app to alert potential users. The app was downloaded by 55,000 people.

The Loop also assisted with posting alerts and sharing that information via its counselling sessions.

"Within an hour of putting out our alerts ... people were coming into The Loop service and they were disposing of those pills with us," The Loop director Fiona Measham said.

Drug testing out in the open

Zurich Street Parade in Switzerland. ( Foreign Correspondent )

Despite front-of-house testing being cancelled at Boomtown, we were able to witness it in action in Switzerland.

Since 2001, testing has been available at the Zurich Street Parade, a massive techno party modelled on the Berlin Love Parade. This year an estimated 850,000 people attended.

We arrived as the party was starting and there was already a line of partygoers waiting to have their drugs tested on the spot.

Unlike back-of-house testing at Boomtown, this wasn't happening in a secure police compound — a team of five chemists and nine social workers were busy moving people through the process.

The sample — pill or powder — is processed into liquid form. Then it's tested in a hi-tech machine called the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). This instrument tests for ingredients and purity.

Safer Party Drug Testing Service at the Zurich Street Parade. ( Foreign Correspondent )

That day the team tested 94 samples. Fifty-four required a warning, 38 of which were for high-strength MDMA, an increasingly common problem.

One young man who tested his cocaine discovered it contained a painkiller substance. He decided to discard the drugs.

The main challenge for this drug testing service is the high demand.

Ninety-four samples would be substantial in a nightclub setting, but it's a small proportion of the people who were using drugs that day at the Street Parade.

But organisers claim the service is effective. They say there's never been a drug related death at an event where they've been testing.

Eleven other European countries also offer drug checking services of some variety.

The political stalemate

Evidence given at the NSW Coronial Inquest has made one thing clear: medical expertise and resources have been fatally substandard at some Australian music festivals.

At Boomtown Fair and the Zurich Street Parade, medical staff were able to have several patients on advanced life support simultaneously.

The NSW Government issued recent guidelines requiring a minimum standard of medical care at music festivals.

Improving medical services is the easy part. Resolving the political stalemate over pill testing is not.

Fiona Measham, The Loop director. ( Foreign Correspondent: Winsome Denyer )

Australian politicians largely seem unable to move past the "green light" concern around front-of-house testing.

Many fear making pill testing available to drug users would condone drug taking and send the message that it can be safe.

That concern is partly shared by Trevor Shine, director of Tictac.

"I'm mildly against it because I think it does normalise drug use," he said.

"I can't see how it doesn't."

Even the director of The Loop, Fiona Measham, acknowledged the power of the green light argument.

"I think for some people when they see The Loop and people queuing up outside, that could be seen as a step too far," she said.

"That people [are] queuing up to have their drugs tested and they're not being arrested."

One possible solution to the stalemate could lie in a recommendation made by a Victorian Parliamentary report last year.

It proposed that festivals set up back-of-house testing to give police, health workers and welfare groups better information to help keep people safe.

Back-of-house testing could offer some of the safety benefits of front-of-house testing, while appeasing the central concerns of its opponents.

So far the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews hasn't accepted that recommendation, and remains opposed to pill testing.

Joy at Boomtown. ( Foreign Correspondent: Winsome Denyer )

"These drugs cannot be consumed at a safe level, therefore we will not be putting in place a pill-testing regime," he said last year.

The UK's largest festival Glastonbury has back-of-house testing only; so do other festivals including Leeds and Reading. Trevor Shine from Tictac runs the Glastonbury service.

"It is a very viable option, probably best used in conjunction with front-of-house, but definitely a good alternative, or a much better alternative than nothing," Mr Shine said.

As Fiona Measham explained, drawing on her experience in the UK, setting up back-of-house testing might eventually pave the way for front-of-house testing.

"A useful first stage is to get the lab onsite to know what's in circulation, and to build up the trust between the chemists, the police, the festival, festival goers."

The NSW Coronial Inquest will draw its own conclusions in its findings, due out later this year.

Loading...