THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
IN THE EARLY NOUGHTIES I went to a festival by the river to ring in the new year. To enhance the experience, I took a blue pill pressed with a dolphin. Twenty minutes later, my brain slid right out of my body and ran off, fractured and angry. My friends left me in the first aid tent with capable but unsympathetic paramedics – I was another reckless teenager taking pills I’d bought from a stranger.
Soon after that night, pill-testing stations started popping up at festivals. They were privately funded and fairly rudimentary, but they gave us more information than any government website had. We knew we couldn’t be certain the pill was safe, but we did get the chance to make a more informed choice and take control of what we did with our own bodies.
The 2019 festival “epidemic” saw the tragic deaths of six young people in Victoria and New South Wales. How might things have been different if they’d been offered another option? In the Netherlands,
