Following pleas from harm minimisation advocates last week, seven people have been hospitalised while a further 83 have been arrested at the Defqon.1 music festival in Sydney over the weekend.
Nearly 20,000 punters flocked to the International Regatta Centre in Penrith for the annual event, now entering its sixth year, which features a large array of electronic artists and hard trance DJs on its lineup performing across several stages.
Despite calls for an end to the sniffer dogs following the tragic death of James Munro last year, police doubled their presence to over 200 officers from Penrith Local Area Command, the North West Metropolitan Region and the Dog Squad.
During the operation police conducted 372 person searches with 83 drug detections. Of the drug arrests, seven were for drug supply offences, while one person was arrested for having 250 pills of what is alleged to be MDMA.
About 350 people received medical treatment for drug and heat-related illnesses with seven taken to Nepean Hospital for further treatment.
This event also marked the anniversary of the worst days in Australian music festival history.
On the 16th September 2013, a 23-year-old festival-goer James Munro died of a drug overdose while 14 others were taken to hospital at the music festival.
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Munro had travelled from Bayswater with two friends to attend Defqon.1 and was discovered barely conscious and abandoned before being taken to the festival’s medical tent. The 23-year-old began having seizures just before midday before he was rushed to Nepean Hospital where he suffered several cardiac episodes before doctors pronounced him dead shortly after 10.30pm.
It was later revealed that Munro had panicked at the gates once when he saw that there was a drug dog operation at the entrance of the festival and swallowed the three ecstasy pills he had purchased online.
There’s a growing chorus of experts and concerned members of the public who have called from an end to drug dog operations at music festivals.
Art Vs Science’s Dan McNamee penned a heartfelt open letter to ban sniffer dogs at Splendour In The Grass this year too, backed up by Caitlin Hughes who was the lead researcher in a study conducted by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre into how sniffers dogs influenced the behaviour of festival patrons.
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The study found that 62% of the 500 New South Wales music fans surveyed showed that they would take drugs to an event with or without police presence at the gates. However, when sniffer dogs were added to the mix, it caused two key changes to the respondents’ answers.
“There was a 13 per cent increase in the number of people who said they’d use at least some of their drugs outside the venue, rather than using them all inside,” says Dr Hughes. “The other big change was a 40 per cent increase in the relative amount of consumption of ecstasy, methamphetamine and other drugs, as opposed to using cannabis.”
Dr Hughes also argued that many punters were switching from the use of marijuana and cannabis to ecstasy and MDMA based on the belief that it was “reducing their potential risk of detection by the dog.”
Munro’s drug-related death is the latest case that’s been linked to using dogs to detect illicit substances but the opposition has stretched back to as far as the 2009 Big Day Out, where teenager Gemma Thoms gulped down three ecstasy tablets to avoid police detection, only to tragically wind up in the hospital morgue a day later.
