Pill testing will be offered to school leavers on the Gold Coast this year.
Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman said a confidential and free service would be rolled out in Surfers Paradise at the end-of-year Schoolies event.
Minister Fentiman said the site would be located close to the entertainment precinct in Surfers Paradise and co-located with other health services.
She said the Schoolies site was an expansion of the existing program to deliver and evaluate fixed-site and event-based drug-checking services.
“It follows the establishment of the first fixed-site service, CheQpoint, in Bowen Hills in April this year and a second CheQpoint fixed site which was opened at Burleigh on the Gold Coast in July.”
Minister Fentiman said in the first month of operation at Bowen Hills, 40 people walked through the doors with a total of 80 samples.
“Of those, 74 percent were commonly recognised unregulated substances, including MDMA, Alprazolam and LSD.”
She said there was also 12 percent of novel psychoactive substances, 3 percent of other less common substances and eight percent of unknown drugs.
“More than half of those people chose to discard the drugs on site and a further 16 percent reported they would discard the substances themselves.”
The Schoolies extension comes as recent data from the National Drug Strategy Household Survey showed that for the first time since national records began, young women aged 18 to 24 were taking illicit drugs at the same rate as young men.
The same survey found that more than one third of young women had taken an illicit drug in the last 12 months, up from 27 percent in 2019.
Minister Fentiman said research showed that drug-checking services helped to reduce the harms of drug use and informed people’s behaviours after receiving relevant health information about the contents of their drugs.
She said in March this year, pill testing was conducted at a multi-day music festival for the first time in Australia, at the Rabbits Eat Lettuce Festival, where 250 people had their substances tested.
“The safety initiative is free, voluntary and confidential. It involves the testing of substances a person is intending to use, providing a health intervention that aims to change a person’s behaviour, and reduce their risk of harms associated with illicit drug use.”
