The Government confirmed last week that drug checking will run as a permanent service at up to 15 music festivals a year, backed by $4.3 million and starting in October.

This is a real win, and it belongs to the families, health workers, researchers and thousands of ordinary people who kept pushing while governments dismissed the evidence and told us it would never happen.

It’s good news. It’s also worth being honest about who it reaches, and who it doesn’t.

A study of MDMA deaths in Australia found 73 per cent happened in private residences. Only 7 per cent happened at festivals or dance parties

Those people are not at festivals. They are at home.

This danger isn’t hypothetical. The NSW Government’s own alerts increasingly show potent opioids like nitazenes turning up in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, in ecstasy, in heroin, in cocaine, and in vapes. People are buying substances that are simply not what they believed they were buying. On multiple occasions over the past two years, people in NSW have overdosed on an opioid they never meant to take. 

These overdoses overwhelmingly happened in the community in NSW – in homes and bedrooms from  border to border – not festivals.

The scale of what we are facing is captured in the  Penington Institute’s 2026 Annual Overdose Report. It showed that overdose deaths in Australia reached 2,596 in 2024 – the highest on record, and a 10.7% jump in a single year. 

More than four in five of those drug-induced deaths were unintentional. 

The toll was nearly double that of road traffic deaths with overdoses from opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines leading that tragic tally. We would never tolerate a road death figure like that without demanding action and we must not tolerate this one either.

We also know that the right policy path forward is well established. The ACT, Victoria, New Zealand and many other countries have already moved to community-based drug checking. 

NSW Health commissioned an independent review of 67 studies from around the world. The review found clear evidence that drug checking services change behaviour, they strengthen market surveillance, and they reach people who wouldn’t normally interact with a health service about their drug use. 

We call on the Government to do what we know we need to do – make community based testing a reality in NSW. NSW needs to establish fixed community sites in Sydney then extend reach across NSW through the distributed model already working well in Canada. 

This can be done without any new legislation.

The need for these services is well established and widely supported. 64% of Australians supported drug checking according to the 2022-23 National Drug Strategy Household Survey. 

Festival testing runs a few weekends a year, at a handful of events with high ticket prices. It can’t reach most people who use drugs. Nor can it provide year-round market surveillance for a robust early warning system.

Festival only drug checking in NSW also effectively puts up a paywall on pill testing.The cheapest way to get a drug checked in NSW last year was $170.

That was a single-day ticket to Yours and Owls in Wollongong, the least expensive entry to any of the twelve festivals in the government’s pill testing trial. Most of the others ran between $199 and $260. A weekend at Lost Paradise was $429.

Dr. Will Tregoning on 10 news calling on community based testing in response to government announcement.

The test itself was free. Getting to it wasn’t.

In Canberra you can walk into a fixed site and have a sample checked for nothing. Same in Victoria. Same in New Zealand, and in dozens of places overseas.

Every other Australian jurisdiction that has run drug checking has moved beyond the festival gate. Disappointingly NSW hasn’t.

Safety shouldn’t have a ticket price. 

That’s why Unharm wrote to Premier Chris Minns and Health Minister Ryan Park last week, together with six health and community organisations: The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) NSW&ACT, Network of Alcohol and other Drugs Agencies (NADA), ACON, Alcohol and Drug Foundation, Uniting NSW.ACT and Community Restorative Centre.

We collectively called for a next phase of drug checking in NSW that includes community-based services, with the first one operating within six months.

This development in NSW is a great first step and we commend the Government for making pilltesting at festivals in NSW a permanent harm reduction measure for festival goers. The next one will save more lives. 

References

[1] Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2026, NSW government to make pill testing permanent after successful trial at music festivals, ABC News, 2 September 2026.

[2] NSW Health 2026, Multiple opioid overdoses following use of cocaine, drug warning issued 30 March 2026.

[3] NSW Health 2026, Multiple tablets containing a high dose of MDMA (ecstasy) and multiple tablets containing a synthetic cathinone (dipentylone) circulating in NSW, drug warning issued 2 February 2026, updated 4 February 2026.

[4] Penington Institute 2026, Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2026, accessed 8 September 2026.

[5] Savic, M, Brien, R & Manning, V 2024, Latest evidence on the impacts of drug checking: a rapid review, Turning Point, Eastern Health Clinical School, Monash University, prepared for the NSW Ministry of Health, October 2024.