Braverman needs to deal in reality and green light drugs testing at UK festivals
The lack of on-site drug testing at festivals this summer could have harmful consequences. It’s part of a broader problem: the Home Office’s “war on drugs” rhetoric is unrealistic, writes Elena Siniscalco
With Glastonbury over, the festival season is in full swing. Every summer, millions of people make the most of the opportunity to listen to their favourite artists, spend time with friends and dance the stress of daily life away.
Festivals are an incredible machine, employing people and moving money. The almost 1,000 music festivals that took place in the UK in 2019 contributed £1.76bn in gross value added to the economy.
Also fuelling Britons’ love of festivals is a rampant drug trade. Between 2017 and 2021 at least fourteen young people died in England after taking drugs during festivals. Experts believe the actual number to be higher.
To reduce the risk of harm, festival organisers introduced on-site “back-of house” drug testing. They partnered with local authorities, police and drug testing organisations to take the drugs confiscated or left in amnesty bins and test them to look for extra strong and dangerous samples.
If the scientists testing them find potentially dangerous drugs, the festival sends an alert to all the people attending through social media or billboards, warning them that a bad batch is doing the rounds. The mother of Georgia Jones, who died at 18 at the Mutiny festival in 2018 after taking MDMA, is convinced her daughter might still be alive had there been drug testing at the festival.
Inexplicably, this summer will be different. Just days before Parklife festival started, Sacha Lord, the organiser and night time economy adviser for Greater Manchester, was informed he needed a special licence to conduct the drug testing which has been in place for the last nine years. The Home Office told the drug-testing agency, called The Loop, that the usual agreement with the local police wasn’t enough.
But it can take up to three months to get the licence, at a cost of over £3,000. So drug-testing didn’t take place at Parklife, and might not take place at many festivals this summer. Lord said that after thirty years in the industry, this summer he was “the most alarmed I’ve ever been before” because of this. “It’s wrong and it’s taking us back in the 1980s”, he said.
Bizarrely, the Home Office was at pains to say they never wanted to block drug testing and a licence was always needed in order to conduct drug testing at festivals. But the festival organisers insist local agreements with police forces have always been enough.
It’s certainly no secret festivals have been doing on-site drugs testing. Indeed, Lord’s festival Parklife piloted the scheme with the Home Office in 2012. If a licence was needed, the Home Office would have presumably wanted festivals to comply before now. To add more confusion to the mix, the Home Office is the regulator of drug testing and has no actual power to fine or block festivals from testing drugs. According to sources in the department, the agency never asked for permission before, and instead relied on agreements with local police. It was only this year when they thought to ask, and were rebuffed. The Loop declined to comment.
What should have been an administrative mix-up with a solution at hand has instead blown up into a debate over testing.
Drug testing has proved to be successful in reducing harm. According to a study conducted in 2016, almost one in five users disposed of their drugs once aware of the content at festivals. Ninety-seven per cent of festival-goers and ninety-six per cent of clubbers said they would use drug testing if it was available. Another three-year research project found zero evidence that drug testing made people feel encouraged to take drugs.
Suella Braverman has taken a zero tolerance approach to drugs, even where it creates more harm. Neither her or any of her predecessors as Home Secretary have been willing to deal with a reality where drug-use is widespread, and instead have relied on “war on drugs” rhetoric, despite yielding little results.
“Back-of house” testing isn’t even that progressive. Other countries, like the Netherlands, do widespread “front-of-house” testing, where people can bring their drugs to get tested to make sure they’re safe, without fear of confiscation or repercussions.
There are other ways of testing drugs. Some festival-goers told Morning Wire they test their drugs at home with reagent kits. These are legal in the UK, but can never give a perfect result as they’re presumptive tests. Glastonbury also found another way of doing things, agreeing to send the confiscated substances to off-site laboratories that have the required licence. It will prove more complex – and probably more expensive than on-site testing – but it’s better than nothing.
In the meantime, DJs including Fatboy Slim and a cross-party group of MPs have written to the Home Office asking them to backtrack on this decision. Lord and other festival organisers are considering a judicial review of the Home Office’s stance.
They’re right in doing so: it’s almost impossible to stop bad drugs from entering the world of festivals, so everything that can be done to safeguard people can save lives.