Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last weekend it was finally time to come face-to-face with Pill Testing Australia to bring some science to the debate that has been raging in the media about pill testing at music festivals. The reality from the tragic coronial inquest in New South Wales is that all of the festivalgoers who died had large amounts of pure MDMA in their bodies, found through toxicology, together with other drugs including alcohol and weed. These concerns shadow the importance of contaminants within pills, which is what we thought the focus of testing was all about. But, after two days of discussion, it is clear that Pill Testing Australia continues with the fallacy that they can tell the dose when they test a pill for a festivalgoer. After all, it is the dose that kills, not the contaminants; we are finding that pure MDMA is putting young Australians in body bags.

For Pill Testing Australia to continue to deceptively make out to the mainstream media that they are testing the dose—when they are not—is grossly misleading. Pill Testing Australia is using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. They are now crowdfunding an attempt to use gas chromatography. None of these tools will measure the dose. Unless you have a pure sample of MDMA, which I suspect they don't, unless you test and retest over hours, which we know they don't, and unless you take that entire pill and destroy it in a solvent to test the entire pill, you cannot measure the dose. We know that Pill Testing Australia doesn't do that. I call on them to come clean.