Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill Testing) Bill 2024

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Danny Pearson:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Luba GRIGOROVITCH (Kororoit) (18:30): I am so incredibly proud to be speaking to this legislation, the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill Testing) Bill 2024, which will give the express legal authority for both mobile and fixed-site pill-testing services to operate here in Victoria. Why am I so proud to speak to this legislation? It is easy. It is because pill testing saves lives and reduces harm to our community.

Various professional organisations – alcohol and drug services and the health, community justice, social and youth service sectors – have publicly championed pill testing for a number of years. However, I want to pay special tribute to one organisation in particular, the mighty Health and Community Services Union, otherwise known as HACSU, today for their strong advocacy and for constantly going above and beyond. HACSU represents the thousands of workers in our alcohol and drug and public mental health workforce. These are the workers who work with drug overdoses and who save lives. In December last year HACSU wrote to the Victorian government urging the Premier and the minister to take up the offer of a free trial of pill testing during summer music festivals. They again continued that. I am very proud that it is this Labor government, the Allan Labor government, that is taking acting and demonstrably going to save the lives of those that we love. Pill testing saves lives, and I commend the bill.

Katie HALL (Footscray) (18:31): I am very pleased to make a contribution on the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill Testing) Bill 2024. From the outset I would like to speak about the importance of prevention and harm minimisation. Pill testing is something I have advocated for, and I am enormously proud to be part of a government that is delivering this reform. I represent one of the youngest electorates in Victoria in this place. My electorate is also home to lots of fantastic festivals – for many years we hosted the Laneway Festival – and my electorate is opposite the Flemington Racecourse and the showgrounds. This last summer at the showgrounds we experienced as a community shocking scenes when a number of young people were admitted to intensive care units after ingesting drugs that made them profoundly and dangerously unwell.

After this terrible summer I approached the Premier and I told her about my experience as a local MP being worried about people in my community – and young people in my community. I was so pleased she listened and she shared with me her concern for young people in Victoria. It was a very troubling summer, and I think as a community we have to act when we know that there are measures we can take to reduce drug and alcohol harm, and pill testing is just one measure. In my community of Footscray, where we have recently been experiencing an increase in drug-related harm, we have acted. We have funded Cohealth and the outreach service to go out and support people and to provide referral services. Of course drugs are changing, and one of the really alarming things is the toxicity of drugs that are now circulating. We are all very worried about the synthetic drug epidemic in America and what we have seen evolve there.

I have a personal experience I want to share, and that is of supporting someone who was experiencing an overdose at a music festival. Music festivals are a joy to me. I love attending music festivals. I am passionate about the live music industry. About 10 years ago at a music festival on a very hot summer night in Victoria I remember walking up to my tent with some girlfriends and literally stumbling over someone who was under a tree. This young man was so unwell he could not speak. We kept trying to ask him where his friends were, what he had taken, and we sat with him when St John ambulance came to help him. As wonderful as they were, they were not paramedics, so they organised for an ambulance to come into the festival site. I hope that that young man ended up okay. We waited with him until the ambulance came and it was a very distressing thing to experience. I know as a parent now – I was not then – that it is your absolute worst nightmare. It is your worst nightmare that your child might make a decision. Let us be honest, people take recreational drugs to enhance experiences and to have fun. It is your worst nightmare that a young person that you love will take a recreational drug and it will end up sending them to an intensive care unit or worse. There are people in this chamber, including the member for Melton, who I know have provided first responder care to people in that situation.

This bill makes important changes to the existing legislation to ensure that we have the necessary legal framework to conduct pill testing. Under the current legislation it is a criminal offence to possess or supply drugs of dependence in Victoria – this does not change that – meaning it would be currently illegal to operate a pill-testing service. Whilst other jurisdictions in Australia have commenced pill-testing trials under existing legislation, Victoria will be the first jurisdiction to explicitly make the provision of pill-testing services legal. Legislation means staff and clients can have confidence that no-one is breaking the law by using, operating or hosting this service. For a service like this to work, people need to have confidence that they will not be in trouble for making a decision about their health. The Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill Testing) Bill will give express legal authority to establish both fixed and mobile pill-testing services in Victoria. Those mobile services are essential because as the music industry is changing festival sites are changing. We saw last summer a very extreme weather event. It was late in the summer, over Easter, when festivals were cancelled and others cropped up. We need these mobile services in place. The bill will establish a licensing framework to authorise, appoint and regulate both fixed and mobile pill-testing services and it will enable the supply of naloxone through secure automated vending machines. I have naloxone in my office. I think naloxone is such an important tool for people to have. It is easy to use to help people who are experiencing an overdose.

The bill does not change the government’s position that illicit drug use carries inherent dangers and can never be considered safe. This is one of the other valuable things about this reform. I want people who are thinking about taking drugs to get advice and to be told about the risks. I want them to know when they walk into that tent or that pill-testing facility that they will be told what might happen. Nothing is safe. But if they make the decision, and many of them do, they will know what is in it. The music community as well – the festival-going community – I know will share that information, and that is vital. It will not require everyone to turn up and get a pill tested, but that information will spread quickly, and that is going to be a really valuable resource to the community as well. We do not condone risk-taking behaviour or illicit activities, but it does mean the action we are taking will help prevent risk to young people. Manufacturing, possessing, using, distributing and selling illicit drugs remain illegal, and those laws will continue to be enforced. We have worked closely with Victoria Police. We know that this can work because around the world there are 31 programs already operating, and of course the ACT and Queensland also have trials in place.

I am really proud that we have made a decision to protect the health of young people in Victoria. As someone who has witnessed an overdose at a festival and sat there nervously waiting for an ambulance to arrive, I am so pleased that we are making this change. This change will not save everyone. It is not going to stop or prevent people from being unwell, but if it saves one life it is the right thing to do. I commend this bill to the house because, as someone who represents a very young community, a community that hosts a lot of live music festivals, it is something that we have been calling for for decades. Finally it is coming, and I am very proud of this government for delivering it.

Steve McGHIE (Melton) (18:41): I rise today to contribute to the discussions on the amendments regarding pill testing in the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill-Testing) Bill ‍2024. Before I go on, I just want to commend the contributions by all of the members, but I do want to single one out, and that is the one by the member for Frankston yesterday, who was so passionate during his contribution, but all the contributions have been fantastic. The fundamental issue of this bill, as the member for Footscray just said, is about saving lives, and young lives at that, mainly young lives, because that is the majority of people that are popping these pills, and generally at festivals.

People know my background in paramedicine. I do not know if anyone in this chamber has ever – and I know the member for Footscray has witnessed a drug overdose – tried to resuscitate someone that has had a drug overdose, so I will describe it to people, and you can just picture it. You have a person, whether they be young or older, that might have popped a pill or a mixture of pills. That is just someone having a good time and acting normally until they pop the pill, and then within a few minutes or within half an hour you see that they have changed. Their demeanour has changed. Some of them will become unconscious and most of these pills depress respiration, so the first sign of seriousness in these issues is this person is on the ground, generally unconscious, non-breathing. If you stop breathing, it is a pretty serious issue, a pretty serious issue to your brain cells, let me tell you, for the length of time depending on how long you are not breathing for. Hopefully someone there will try and assist that person in trying to, let us say, resuscitate them.

What would happen is if you stop breathing and you stop breathing for a considerable period of time, then your heart will stop and you will go into full cardiac arrest. Sometimes people do not notice that someone is on the ground in cardiac arrest. They think they are asleep. Sometimes they will become cyanosed, so they will become blue in colour. Again, they are not breathing, so of course you try and resuscitate that person, and if we are fortunate enough to get defibrillation to them, proper resuscitation, whether an ambulance arrives, you can be quite fortunate in resuscitating those people. If there is naloxone available, it is an amazing drug. I do not know if anyone has ever seen the efforts of naloxone when it is administered. If it is done by intramuscular injection or IV, as ambos would do it, people instantly will sit up. They will come straight out of their unconsciousness and sit up. Some of them would be quite aggressive. If it is intranasal, it might take a little bit longer. That does not mean that they do not need ongoing medical treatment – they do, and they need observation. Some of them will get up and wander off. They will take off in their aggressive tone, because they have had an overdose and you have upset that process for them. They have got this anti-overdose drug, naloxone, and they are quite angry about it – not quite normal of course, but quite angry about it.

The unfortunate thing is that we do not save everyone in these overdoses. I do not know if anyone has ever had an experience of telling a family member ‘I’m sorry, we couldn’t resuscitate your child’ or ‘couldn’t resuscitate your relative’. It is pretty damn hard to go and tell a family member, friend or a bystander that might have been at the festival with the young person, ‘Your friend is no longer going to be with you.’ They are the experiences of someone overdosing. They are the experiences of people who will try and assist in providing support to those people that have overdosed and even save their lives. That is fundamentally what this issue is about. We do not want them to get into that situation of overdosing, right. What we are doing here with pill testing is trying to prevent that and to prevent the tragic outcome with some of them – that is, not surviving.

It would be remiss of us in this place to assume we have the power to stop drug use – of course we do not – across this state. Let me say, while we talk about pill testing, we seem to focus on the younger generation. The younger generation are not the only ones that have trouble with drugs. The general community have trouble with drugs, and we are talking about prescribed medications. There are more overdoses through prescribed medications out of the older community members than what there are with the younger community members. Let us not focus on young kids. We have a problem with drugs right across our community, and some of them are illicit and some of them are prescribed. It is not just focusing on kids.

Where we can make it safer for those who do choose to consume illicit substances and save lives in this process, we must make the necessary changes, and that is what this bill is about. Pill testing is one way that the Allan Labor government is committed to saving lives across the state and helping people make better and more informed decisions surrounding illicit drug consumption. That is the whole idea through this pill-testing process. It is not just about testing the drug, but it is about assisting them, educating them, informing them about the risk and also trying to provide other additional supports. That is what this pill-testing bill is about, and that is what the process is about: engaging with these people that are taking and trialling these drugs. Of course with the synthetic drugs that are around today we do not know what is contained in these drugs. Again, the pill-testing regime will sort that out for us, we hope.

I want to extend my thanks to the Minister for Mental Health Minister Stitt in the other place and of course the Premier for the fantastic work on this bill and bringing this bill forward. I also want to extend my gratitude to all of the health unions that are supportive of this bill: the Health and Community Services Union, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Victorian Ambulance Union and the AMA. They have all supported this pill-testing bill because they know, and of course their professions are all about helping and saving people. That is what they do. That is their job. They see the difference every day in their working careers around the fine line between life and death. If we can prevent younger people, generally speaking, who are pill popping from dying, then this bill will be very successful.

As I said earlier, it is also about providing other information to these people that are engaging in this practice, information that can inform them, and they can then make a value judgement on whether they continue the practice or not. We know that drug taking is a high-risk action. In 2023 alone we saw 547 Victorians die from drug overdoses. That is the second-highest annual figure that we have seen. We are trying to stamp out drug taking alone. We are not going to stop that, but we can assist in other ways through this bill. If you compare the 547 deaths in 2023, that is a lot higher than the road toll deaths in the same year. We have accepted that our road toll deaths are too high, and time and time again we have tried to implement measures that encourage our road users to drive a lot safer. We have put a lot of time, effort and money into road safety to prevent death, and this is an avenue for our government to prevent death through people trialling the drug or the pills that they are taking but also the dangerous synthetic drugs that have been created now. Contributions were put up yesterday in regard to fentanyl and nitazenes and things like that that are on the market now and coming into this country – really highly potent drugs – and as I said, they can change a person’s life within a matter of seconds.

It is only by sheer luck that some of those people will survive the taking of those drugs, because others will assist in resuscitating them and bringing them back to life. It is a fine line. It is not a great experience resuscitating someone, especially a young person you know has caused harm to themselves. You never forget it, and I know the member for Footscray raised the experience she had when she stumbled across a young man under a tree. Thank God she did stumble across him, because I can tell you what, from my experience he is probably alive today because of that stumble, and that is what is important. We all need to have a go at supporting these kids and trying to stop them taking the drugs, but if they are taking them, this pill-testing bill will assist them in the future.

Lauren KATHAGE (Yan Yean) (18:51): I rise in support of the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Pill Testing) Bill 2024. I would like to start with a quote about this work and about the work that we are doing through this bill. That quote is: ‘They obviously want to save lives.’ That is a quote from the member for Narracan. I thank him for recognising the great work that we are doing through this bill, because we have a fundamentally different approach to those opposite but our goal is to save lives. Seatbelts do not mean that we condone speeding, life jackets do not mean we accept drowning and Quitline does not mean we promote smoking, just as pill testing does not mean that we condone drug use, but these are things that exist to keep people alive, because we know that people do not always make the best choices. The ‘just say no’, high-horse approach of those opposite does not work. We need a health-led approach. The war on drugs –

Bridget Vallence: Acting Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of the house.

Quorum formed.

Lauren KATHAGE: Well, I am so glad I packed up my speech, but here we go. As I was saying, seatbelts, life jackets, Quitline – all of these things just mean that we want to stop people from dying. It is not about judgement. It is not about saying that we are going to climb up on our high horse above people and tell people how they should lead their lives and watch on from a lofty height as they die. That is not what this government is about. This government is about a health-led approach. We know what happens when the hardline approach is taken. If you think, for example, about sniffer dogs at music festivals, we had the terrible, terrible case in Western Australia of the young girl Gemma, a beautiful, happy 17-year-old, who died. She had gone to Big Day Out, one of the biggest music festivals. It was a hot day. Noticing that the sniffer dogs were there and worrying about being caught, she took all of the tablets she had at once, and that was a fatal quantity of ecstasy. By the time she was taken to hospital her temperature was 43 degrees, and there was nothing that doctors could do to save her. Think about that approach to young people’s drug use at festivals and the outcome that caused, compared to a health-led approach which recognises that people will use drugs and instead seeks to keep them alive and provide them with information that will help them and not harm them.

My best mate from high school is still alive, but in many ways I lost her when we were still teenagers. She took up with a guy from a different group that we did not know too well. They headed to a bush doof, which was the type of music that she liked, and she took a pill that was contaminated with something. The impact on her life continues; 25 years later she is still impacted by that choice. These are impacts that can be stopped through pill testing. She is one of the lucky ones. Think of all the deaths each year from overdose, all the people that do not get to have that continued friendship or that continued relationship with the people they love and care about, and I think here of the young girl whose story I was explaining before. It is worth noting that her mother, when recounting the story 10 ‍years on, said the pain has not reduced a single bit, 10 years after losing her beautiful teenage daughter.

This health-led response is the right thing to do. It has support from experts, and the list of experts who support the health-led approach is lengthy. It includes the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Public Health Association of Australia, the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association and the Penington Institute. But it is not just experts that support this approach, it is also parents. Parents want their children to come home after being out. Parents are not going to write their child off for a bad choice. They just want their kids home safe and well, and that is what this legislation seeks to do.

Those opposite are not in support of pill testing, and they have really performed some incredible mental gymnastics to justify and explain why they do not support pill testing. We heard complaints yesterday from the member for Brighton. His complaint was that the pill testing as proposed does not provide enough information to people having their pills tested. He said that if more information could be provided to people having pills tested, it would save lives. But at the same time they are saying that they oppose pill testing, so people would have no information at all. Therefore the risk to life would be increased. That is some incredible mental gymnastics from the member for Brighton. To me that seems –

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I am required by sessional orders to interrupt business.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.