1 December 2019
USING ECSTASY WITH OTHER DRUGS DEADLY
As another festival death is publicised in the media, this time at Tocumwal NSW, the country’s peak drug prevention body, Drug Free Australia, believes it once again reinforces the dangers of using ecstasy with other drugs.
A recent study of 392 ecstasy-related deaths in Australia (see p 18) between 2001 and 2016 found no deaths from impurities or contaminants in pills. There was no record of deaths from bad batches where other deadly drugs were cut with the MDMA in a pill. Both were central rationales for introducing pill testing, but neither caused Australian deaths in the study. The main cause of ecstasy deaths was from users using ecstasy with other licit and illicit drugs such as alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines and benzodiazepines. 189 of the 392 deaths, almost half, were from ecstasy and polydrug use, significantly more than the appalling toll of 115 who died from ecstasy-related accidents and trauma during that period.
Gary Christian, Research Director for Drug Free Australia asserts that pill testing spends its time barking up the wrong tree. “We’ve had 392 deaths in 16 years where not one of those deaths was triggered by something other than the ecstasy in the pill. Not by impurities nor by other synthetic drugs mixed in the pill as we were so often falsely told. The triggers for ecstasy death all lie outside the pill – idiosyncratic reactions to ecstasy, polydrug use, higher ambient temperatures and differing social situations. None of those are properties found in a pill,” he said. And because scientific studies have shown that ecstasy overdose is rare it is clear that the third rationale regarding overdoses from increasing purity is scientifically not yet demonstrated.
Since Drug Free Australia started highlighting the false claims of Harm Reduction Australia last year, it has responded by claiming that their real role now is in trying to talk users out of consuming their pill. But there has been no evidence of counsellors dissuading any user from taking their tested pill, with not one user recorded discarding their ecstasy in the Canberra trial last April, evidencing zero behaviour change.
“Harm Reduction Australia wants to waste $3.8 million of taxpayer money further trialling pill testing which neither addresses the real causes of ecstasy-related deaths nor convinces ecstasy users they should bin the substance which caused all MDMA-related pill deaths in 16 years. If Harm Reduction Australia says their counsellors can best inform a handful of patrons of the dangers of polydrug use, we would counter that flashing signs on the festival’s hotdog stand or the main stage’s screens can notify tens of thousands of festival goers that it is ecstasy, often in a polydrug-use setting, that has caused almost all the party drug deaths of hundreds of Australians.”
drugfree.org.au
Media contact Gary Christian Research Director Drug Free Australia (02) 4362 9839 Mobil 0422 163 141