Testing the pills confirmed a simple reality: Australians are using illegal drugs, she said, pointing to data which show that more than 1 million Australians have used cocaine in the past 12 months.
“There are huge numbers of people using all sorts of drugs. The 'just say no to drugs' approach has not worked and is not working,” said Schumann, who heads the Victorian Institute of Forensic Science's drug enforcement unit.
A bill to allow pill trials will be introduced into Victorian parliament on Tuesday.Credit: Paul Rovere
“We need to be realistic and accept that some people will use drugs. And there are ways we can reduce the harm associated with that.”
Minister of Mental Health Ingrid Stitt described the policy as “common sense.”
“The evidence is clear that pill testing reduces harm and saves lives, and we have acted swiftly since announcing our plans to prepare services for the next festival season,” Stitt said.
How Pill Testing Works
The exact strategy for testing the tablets in Victoria is still being finalised, but Schumann said it would likely focus on two technologies: FTIR and liquid chromatography.
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) works by exposing a sample to infrared light.
“The substances will be excited by certain wavelengths. And then they will retransmit the light – what will be reflected 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 called the drug testing study “common sense”. Credit: Jason South
This light signature can then be compared against a database of known drug signatures, allowing the chemical composition to be quickly identified.
FTIR is fast but has some limitations: it generally cannot detect trace levels below 5 percent. If the drug is an impure mixture of several low-grade compounds, identification can be very difficult: a test of the machine at the Groovin the Moo festival in Canberra was could not be identified 53 percent of samples.
Liquid chromatography can fill that gap. The technology is more accurate, but it takes days to analyze. Schumann said that in some countries, some drug users go to church before attending a music festival.
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