Banning festivals in Australia is pointless

Last month NSW premier Mike Baird said he’d be asking his ministers to review the system for granting permits to music festivals because he’d had ‘enough’. Following a number of high-profile drug-related deaths at festivals in recent years, the hospitalisation of a 23-year-old woman who attended Field Day on New Year’s Day proved the last straw for the man in charge of the state. The government declared events needed to take responsibility for drug-related incidents that occur at them, whether they be deaths, hospitalisations or arrests.

“If new rules and procedures place additional burdens and costs on organisers, so be it,” Mr Baird said. “And we will also examine denying permits to organisers who have not done the right thing in the past.”

But what is the ‘right thing’? And could banning music festivals have anything other than a negative impact on society?

We don’t think so.

“You’d just drive those festival-goers into underground raves,” Sydney Greens MP David Shoebridge told Mixmag. “We’d simply see a change in the way people consume drugs.” Mr Shoebridge said music festivals put in place safety measures such as first-aid tents and chill out rooms, which would be lacking at alternative parties. “It’s very hard to book the St John of God Ambulance for an illegal underground rave,” he said. “Maybe the government doesn’t get that.”

The conservative NSW government, responsible for the infamous ‘lockout laws’, doesn’t seem to get a lot of things, and that’s the worrying thing. Or perhaps it does, and is pursuing these policies anyway, which is even worse.

“I’m no fan of boxing,” president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation Dr Alex Wodak weighed in. “But if boxing was banned, there would still be people who want to box and others willing to watch … without of course the benefit of any regulation. I’m certain that unregulated boxing would be much worse. Same with youth dance music events. Banning them will just drive them underground. No first-aid. No education about how to minimise risk. No chill rooms or cold drinks. And of course no pill-testing either.”

Fuzzy Events director John Wall said music festivals, including Field Day, did all they could to prevent drug-related deaths and hospitalisations. “The reason this (negative) perception exists is because at festivals the police are able to run large and conspicuous sniffer dog operations, which are usually followed by a press release announcing how many people were caught,” Mr Wall said.

Two weeks ago, Victoria Police threatened to withdraw their support of Rainbow Serpent after 40 festival-goers (out of 300 tested from the 16,000 strong crowd) showed traces of drugs in their system during a roadside operation. Festival director Tim Harvey pointed out the results were similar during an operation across the Australian Football League grand final weekend in Melbourne last year. "(But) no one is calling for the grand final to be banned,” Mr Harvey said.

So are music festivals just a target for police and politicians to attack and unfairly attribute problems found everywhere in society? It seems that way.

Mr Wall said a thorough study of every MDMA-related death for five years in Australia found almost none occurred at music festivals. “The police, significant medical facilities and the media are not present at peoples’ homes when they take drugs, so of course anything that happens doesn’t make headlines,” he said. “On top of that, it’s clearly not nearly as safe a place to be. With the amount of policing, security, medical staff, customer education and supervision inherent in a music festival, it’s quite literally one of the safest places on earth you can go. Removing festivals could increase harm, but not reduce it. It would be like banning patrolled surf beaches.”

So, rather than continuing to shriek BAN IT at everything in sight from the roof of parliament house after a few soda waters with the lads, surely Mr Baird should at least engage an open discussion about other options?

To us, it seems like music festivals are doing all they can to prevent these tragic incidents. But others out there with a whole lot of power on the issue aren’t.

“The government should be working with festival organisers to ensure they have the most reliable access to pill-testing possible,” Mr Shoebridge said. “Get rid of the drug dogs. If they’re not going to do that, they should do what the UK does and put in place amnesty bins. Rather than have that panic ingestion (of drugs) they should be able to place them in an amnesty bin.”

Dr Wodak agreed the government was ignoring a great opportunity to minimise harm and potentially save lives by refusing to entertain the idea of pill-testing. “There is a direct benefit to the consumer - if they find out that the pill contains a toxin, most consumers throw the pill away,” he said. “The main reason that the drug market is dangerous is that untested drugs are sold from unregulated outlets. Pill-testing would be a form of quasi-regulation.”

In January, an open letter signed by Mr Shoebridge and Dr Wodak called on the NSW government and police to work with music festivals to allow trials of independent pill-testing this summer. The letter was submitted with more than 550 signatures, and has so far been met with “embarrassing silence” from the government, according to Mr Shoebridge. “That’s consistent with their approach on drugs which is not reliant on evidence and working for a solution, but just hoping it will go away,” Mr Shoebridge said.

So what can we do to make sure governments in NSW and across Australia accept their own responsibility and listen to calls for a safer approach to drugs?

Not shut up, basically.

Start conversations, write to newspapers, email MPs, share your views on social media, sign the open letter and join theAustralian Drug Law Reform Foundation.

It all helps.

“There’s a historical inevitability to this. But we will only get it when the community voice is so strong that it forces the … government to act,” Mr Shoebridge said. “We know it saves lives. I think we really need to shout them down with some civil disobedience on it.”

Scott Carbines is Mixmag's Australian Online News Editor, follow him on Twitter here.

[Image via: Duncographic]