Majority of Drug Searches at Victorian Music Festivals Find No Drugs

Victoria Police find no drugs in the majority of their drug searches at music festivals, according to new data revealed in parliament.

This comes after nine people were taken to hospital in critical conditions after MDMA overdoses at a Melbourne festival on the weekend. 

Paramedics treated patients at the Hardmission Festival in Flemington on Saturday night before transporting them to hospitals.

Eight of the nine people were placed into induced comas and three remained in a critical condition as of Monday night. 

“It’s quite a high-level treatment that our paramedics perform and it’s reserved for health conditions,” the Victorian Ambulance Union's secretary Danny Hill told the ABC.

“It’s probably quite rare that we would see this amount of people needing such aggressive treatment.”

Hill called for better harm reduction, “whether it’s pill checking or pill testing”.

“Often there are a lot of other chemicals and other medications mixed in with it and clearly whatever people have taken have had quite a negative effect.”

But new data released to state parliament on Monday has also put a spotlight on the effectiveness of police drug searches. 

In 2022-23, Victoria Police conducted 277 drug searches at music festivals. Only 120 of those searches resulted in drugs being found.

Police need to reasonably suspect a person is carrying drugs or a weapon in order to conduct a search – the majority of which are pat-down searches, rather than strip searches. One cause for a search is a sniffer dog’s indication.  

But a Victoria Police spokesperson argued searches that were unsuccessful did not mean a sniffer dog was wrong.

“If a person is carrying drugs, odour will permeate into their clothing and remain after the drugs have been removed leaving a residual odour, resulting in a positive illicit drug indication by the dog,” they said.

In NSW, where the sniffer dog program is much broader than in Victoria and costs almost $5 million a year, data released to the Greens in November revealed no drugs were found in 75 per cent of searches triggered by sniffer dogs. 

But still in Victoria, police do not publish search data freely and several politicians have pushed for this information to be made public.

The Greens’ drug harm reduction spokesman Aiv Puglielli told the Age people deserved to know the efficacy of sniffer dogs and whether searches in fact caused more harm.

“Given that Victorian taxpayer dollars are being spent on this controversial drug detection scheme, it is important that we have up-to-date information to prove that this use of funds is effective and will actually keep Victorians safe from drug overdose. If this isn’t the case, then the scheme should be scrapped,” Puglielli said.

Aleksandra Bliszczyk is the Deputy Editor of VICE Australia. Follow her on Instagram.

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