Author: Gideon Warhaft

Stephanie Tzanetis is coordinator for Directions Health at CanTEST, the A-C-T’s fixed site pill testing service. She’s also the Executive Officer at Pill Testing Australia, which provided Australia’s first on-site music festival pill testing at Groovin the Moo in 2018. She says results from the first six months of the ACT trials, which were independently…

The Victorian government is being urged to reassess its stance on pill-testing after the death of a man from a suspected drug overdose at a weekend music festival. The 23-year-old was airlifted in a critical condition to the Alfred hospital in Melbourne from Mafeking near Ararat, in the state’s south-west, in the early hours of…

The NSW health department has issued a drugs warning after 11 people who believed they were using cocaine or methamphetamine recently experienced an opioid overdose. Read more

Dr Green said that, without drug testing being made available to the public, it was too challenging to find out what was in a drug after a patient had suffered an overdose. Read more

Chemistry lead of CanTEST, Australia’s only fixed-site drug checking service, Malcolm McLeod told ABC RN’s Life Matters that “around 10 per cent to 15 per cent of samples [are] maybe not as expected”. Read more

Gino Vumbaca, president of drug safety organisation Harm Reduction Australia, said his website receives “at least two to three emails a day” from people who want to safely test the pills that they or their children have. Read more

A two-year pill-testing trial would cost Victoria about $3.7 million, the Parliamentary Budget Office has found, as left-wing crossbenchers pressure the state government over drug reform after overdoses at this summer’s festivals. Read more

NSW Health is warning of the dangers of tablets which are being sold as MDMA (ecstasy) and found to contain a potent opioid (nitazene). Three people presented to Sydney hospitals over the past weekend, after taking as little as half a tablet. One patient was admitted to the ICU and has since been discharged home.…

A 2023 report on the first six months of Canberra’s fixed drug-testing site showed that when a substance tested was not what the user expected, they were four times more likely to discard the drug. These tests can serve as a last-ditch attempt to save a life. Read more

Victorian taxpayers spend up to $3.9 million a year on MDMA-related overdoses in ambulances, emergency departments, hospital admissions and coronial inquiries, leading advocates to argue there is a financial case for pill testing. Read more