So Long, Rock and Roll...

Once upon a time, many years ago in my late teens and early 20s, I worked as a tour manager and band/artist manager in New Zealand. In fact it was my first foray in to entrepreneurship, starting a small record company with a friend of mine in Wellington.

So, it would be fair to say I have a sense of nostalgia and responsibility toward the music community, live performance venues and festivals, who once again are being attacked under the guise of 'Harm Reduction". This article serves to highlight that in my opinion, no such harm reduction is likely to take place, and supports that position with some anecdotes as well as fact taken from various reports including the national health survey, recreational drug survey, and Australian hospital reports.

What this is not, is an advocacy for participation in what is still in most countries illegal and dangerous.

However, I do hope this serves to offer a balanced opinion piece that highlights the danger of the proposed New Festival License in NSW, and potential impacts, while elaborating on what I consider to be the wider issue.

Read on.

My friend and colleague and I stood at the back of the sold-out venue, watching our friends and clients perform their new album to a full house. Speechless, we quietly sipped our drinks, shared a cigarette, and celebrated the achievement of this band we jointly managed sharing their art with nearly 500 people.

To get there, they’d played shows to empty rooms on tour, on ski fields, as opening acts, at corporate functions, and as a wedding band to make ends meet and fund the next tour. They’d hustled and grinded for years, eventually making their way on the New Zealand festival circuit where their career really started to take shape, along with dozens of other artists who’d earned their place on the national stage.

I know this because for several of those years, I drove those folks (and others like them) around in my parents’ van, stayed in youth hostels, stood on the door and sold tickets, manned the light desk, went searching for the wine drunk and randy drummer in the dead of the southern night – you name it. But, I also got to stand in the room night after night and watch these folks perform music I loved, and I learned new things every day. It was a wondrous, exciting, formative period in my life and I’m eternally grateful for it. I miss it.

I feel strongly other young people in the entertainment industry should have those same opportunities, after-all, what I’m talking about really wasn’t that long ago.

Remarkably, live art is under threat in New South Wales.

Under the guise of ‘Harm Minimisation’ the proposed ‘New Music Festivals License’ applies broad, unquantifiable, and market manipulating restrictions and fees on events that meet the below criteria in NSW.

- Have more than two headline acts + two opening acts

- Attract more than 2,000 people

- Are over 5 hours in duration

- A festival where the music is the focus, and not a secondary attraction

While previously Liquor and Gaming only had to approve a festivals liquor license, they now have approval over the entire festival.

A so called “risk matrix” will determine how much risk minimisation the festival must provide. Including a ‘user pays’ policing requirement, as a condition of the event. This means that if the festival doesn’t pay for the police, they don’t get the license. There is no proposed justification or transparency requirement from Liquor and Gaming NSW that the festivals may query. The fee, per ticket sold, will range from $0.60c to $2.00 (but may change).

Let me give you some idea of which events this will impact.

FOMO Festival, Defqon 1, The Knockout Games of Destiny & The Lost Paradise.

Four events where tragically five young people ingested a deadly mix or quantity of banned substances, and lost their lives. There’s a whole other debate going on if these tragic losses of life were preventable, but this is not the forum for that discussion. Regardless, five families are without their children, brothers and sisters today, and by any measure that’s a hideous, tragic, sad, waste of life.

What I will say is this – accidental drug related deaths in Australia outnumbered road fatalities in 2016, and I suspect that has not changed much since.

The average age of a recreational drug user is 34 years old, and the portion of people in their 20’s using banned substances has decreased from 35% to 28% since 2001 (based on the National Drug Survey).

The most fatal drug group are opioids, followed by over the counter benzodiazepines – otherwise known as sleeping or anti-anxiety medications.

What’s my point?

We cannot look at drug related deaths at music festivals in isolation, or punish the people who create forums of expression, performance, passion, entertainment and art with punitive licensing and fee structures that are likely to either force them to move to another state, or to not operate at all. There seems to be a misinterpretation of what goes on at such festivals, and it’s being taken out of context and not as part of a considerably wider issue.

The reality is that wherever there are young, liberated people in their formative years – some of them will experiment regardless of environment. As a young man growing up in a Christian family I looked forward to going to the Christian music festival ‘Parachute’ where I very clearly recall another young man from my youth group being arrested for being in possession of over an ounce of cannabis.

Why? Because business was so good…

You know what else there was a lot of at that festival?

Birth control and emergency birth control. Yup, Christian kids getting freaky in the back of the tent.. It turns out religion doesn't transcend biology.

Young people, wild hormones and a sense of experimentation and freedom will inevitably lead to some dumb decisions.

Now, to be clear, I am not advocating using banned substances and I, personally, do not. The mind and body is a wonderfully complex and fragile thing – please be careful with it.

I remember someone I knew as a teenager who bought what was then legal, synthetic cannabis over the counter, consumed a small amount, and proceeded to break a window and slash his own wrists in a psychotic episode.

These are inconsistently produced chemicals, and how your mind and body will respond is as unpredictable as the compounds present in them.

The people selling these stimulants rarely care about the welfare of their customers, the organisations that manufacture and distribute these substances use extortion, theft and violence to retain their power and influence to maintain trade. Ignorance is bliss to the consumer, but a short browse of Youtube documentaries on the production of recreational drugs will soon enlighten most to the dark and insidious underbelly of the drug trade.

Outlawing these chemicals serves to do a couple of things.

Make it undesirable to trade them by the organisations that produce them, reduce associated crime by those who distribute them, and reduce harm to those who may use them. For context, between 2016 and 2017 there were about 137,000 hospitalisations with drug related diagnoses.

Of those, 51% of those were alcohol, 16% were stimulants or hallucinogens and 13% were analgesics (including opioids and pain medication). It is a considerable strain on the healthcare system, it is largely preventable, your taxes are paying for it.

So, getting high might not kill you, but it may well mess you up enough for an overnight trip to the hospital. It may have long serving (perhaps even lifetime), unpredictable and harmful side effects. At some of the festivals noted earlier, up to 10 other people were hospitalised with drug related maladies.

*I want to quickly at this juncture share that I feel there is an exception to the above, which are substances that are being developed or researched with medically relevant properties, under controlled, legal conditions*.

Let’s say this proposed license is successful in ‘harm minimisation’, or perhaps more appropriately – harm relocation. That’s my guess anyway. The supply and consumption of banned substances will simply move away from the threat of being caught. The onset time for MDMA based substances is 20-70 minutes, with a duration of 3-5 hours based on consuming 75-125mg (or 1.54mg per kilo of body weight).

What this means is people will simply pre-dose, and possibly (if the obscene level of ignorance and poor education continues) overdose prior to heading out to a festival, or at an unpoliced location nearby.

So, let’s then conclude that there is a wider issue at play here, and asking festival promoters to be something of a ceremonial sacrifice toward a large, decades old, complex social issue, is not the answer.

Back to the music festival point I was trying to make earlier…

Let’s look at the wider impact of this license, and it’s potential to be misused, misinterpreted, and weaponised by the state to make NSW a prohibitively expensive, complex or exploitative market to operate in.

As it stands, the festivals I noted earlier are four of 85 events state wide that meet the criteria proposed by the department of Liquor and Gaming. This excludes events that may well meet these criteria, but do not currently identify themselves as a ‘festival’ – I can think of a number of electronic music events that would easily meet these criteria and be subject to the same licensing requirements.

Clearly the dialogue between the entertainment industry and the state government has broken down. There appears to have been little or no consultation or industry impact research done.

As a community, we cannot encourage young people to participate in recreational drug use when it is costing lives.

We cannot make it easy or endorse the use of banned substances by expecting the government or law enforcement to make assurances of the purity and strength of banned substances by providing so called ‘pill testing’.

Equally, if you think for a second that ‘penalty free pill testing’ at festivals (as has been proposed) is not going to attract the attention of the police you’re very much mistaken. They will absolutely profile people using these facilities, and you will be a target for police interest. I would call these pill testing stations ‘a cop magnet’ – and so it should be, don’t promote your currently illegal recreational pastime in public! If that status quo changes, that’s a different conversation.

I feel strongly the message should be, if you are going to do this, use the thing between your ears and take responsibility for own safety by purchasing a test-kit online or in a store for about $10.

In the same way that if you drink and dive, you may have a horrendous accident and be killed or kill someone else, or if your hormones get the better of you and you have consensual sex without birth control or protection, you might get someone pregnant or become pregnant or contract an unwanted disease. In both circumstances, culturally, we would respond by saying “why the hell did you drink and drive?” or “why didn’t you wear protection?” – we hold people (young people too) accountable for the consequences of their actions. Likewise, I feel like we should be aiming for a similar level of accountability where we say “why didn’t you test your pills?”. But we're not there yet.

In recent months, there have been five young people who paid the ultimate price for doing what some young people do – experiment, explore their minds and bodies, try new things and have fun. There are no appropriate words to describe the sadness those families and friends must be feeling. Something must be done to curb the unnecessary waste of young life associated with drug taking in or around festival environments. But I don’t believe penalising the festival is it.

Perhaps we can consider;

1- Higher levels of education and greater accessibility to information (perhaps app based?). Eg, if you ARE going to do this, here’s what you should know. Information on 'safe' dosages, onset time, where to get test kits, etc.

2- State endorsement of and easily accessible substance testing kits through pharmacies and physicians (those that choose to stock and endorse, which many do). And by those who are bound by patient or customer privacy laws.

3- A review on penalties imposed for distribution and consumption. Recently the NSW state government announced that people who distribute a banned substance that results in a death will face harsher sentences in line with involuntary manslaughter (up to a 25 year prison term), and fines for possession could increase to as high as $500.

4- Consultation with countries and agencies that have succeeded in drug use reduction, control and mitigation. While Portugal’s revolutionary 2001 drug reform is not a like-for-like comparison, a component of that was the management and harm reduction of recreational drug use that was spearheaded by the agency Apdes (https://www.apdes.pt) under the name ‘Check!n’ (https://www.apdes.pt/…/health-harm-reduction-hu…/check!n.html) and have produced a number of reports on the impact of their work in the festival, disco, party and nightlife scene in Portugal.

Festivals are fun, in fact, that’s all they are about. Fun with like-minded people, and music, and dance, and cool stuff like lasers. They are a forum for people to perform, create, and share art. They are a place for people to form lifetime memories and have wonderful, enriching experiences.

This proposed license targets the promoter as if they have some kind of influence over the behavior of their guests and should be held financially accountable for that based on non-transparent and highly anecdotal information. It is sending the wrong message, it is holding the wrong group accountable.

It is, in my opinion, a scapegoat for a state government that is too suborn to engage in meaningful discussion, compromise, or invest in education.

Nevertheless, we are all responsible for our own safety and that of our friends and peers. But if this keeps up, there won’t be anything left to be responsible for – and that would be really sad.