Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are a high-value, high-price illicit drug economy and the international drug cartels know it, so the last thing we want to be doing is pill testing at music festivals. For goodness sake, the only safe bill is one that is not swallowed. When you deem a pill safe, how are four illicit pills safe? You cannot control the volume. What you do by calling pills safe is endorse the entire upstream provision line of drug cartels and associated groups. When you deem a pill safe, you then sanction all of the health effects that follow. For goodness sake, the only safe pill testing is a sniffer dog and appearing before the law. That is why we call drugs 'illicit'.

Hotels and licensed premises should not be mixing energy drugs and alcohol. I hear Labor MPs laughing. When you drink energy drinks and alcohol together you double the chances of being taken advantage of sexually and you double the chances that you will take advantage of someone sexually—the smiles are dropping off their faces now—you double the chances that you will drive in a vehicle with someone who is intoxicated and you treble the likelihood of binge consumption. As the state, we do not want to endorse that; we want to stop it. I can understand some young people, every weekend, want to be drug-effed, but that is not a good enough reason to sanction that on Monday morning. The hallucinations, the health effects, the days lost and the sickies—stand up to it. There is no such thing as a safe pill. Do not let music festivals start testing pills. We should not have pills in music festivals; we should be able to go to them safely without illicit drugs.