Saving Our Youth at Music Festivals. Pill Testing

Deaths at music festivals are on the increase.


It's sad but this week another innocent teen died at the hands of an accidental overdose. It's occurred three times in the last month. Now's there's a debate about testing the drugs distributed at musical festivals.

If you read the tweets and listen to the traditional media on this topic, it'll have us believing the general consensus is that pill testing should take place at every musical festival - to find out what's exactly inside the concoctions that are illegally dispensed to young Aussies before they swallow and then become victims.

What has happened to this world?

Why are we at the point of debating of testing pills?

When I was younger, I was taught not to put foreign things into my body. Don't do it. The message was clear. The extension to that was 'Don't accept anything from strangers.'

It was so simple. DON'T DO IT.

Each of us are responsible for OUR own mistakes, not someone else, certainly not those from an illegal, anonymous drug supplier/manufacturer providing drugs at a raucous music party. He or she is in it for the money.

It's not the medical profession's responsibility to keep the youth safe either, not the police's, the Government, schools, or anyone else. That falls upon the teenager who places a pill on his or her tongue and chooses to swallow it - and the parents who have failed to raise a responsible young adult when one dies.

Perhaps this is why this move is on to shift responsibility to event organizers and pill testers. Rather than accepting parental blame, the attention goes elsewhere, anywhere. It's easier to do that than accept truth: Adults failing to educate their young properly.

Okay, let's be fair. The adults are only PARTLY to blame. I said that already.

Education, pill testing, bag and body examinations won't stop deaths because stupidity will continue to happen - there's no screening out the idiots.

But pill-testing wastes resources and has an adverse effect on the community. What it'll do is take  responsibility off parents by letting them believe music festivals are safe places and giving teens a plausible argument to hand to their parents about attending them.

And then everyone plays it dumb, as though everything's going to be fine and dandy.

No place is 'safe'. 

A stranger testing strange pills supplied/made by another stranger at a music event isn't going to make the event 'safe'. It's only going to have us believe it's 'safe'. There's a enormous gap between these two lines. Only their words are similar. Their meanings differ greatly.

How any human-being comes to placing an unknown substance they got from a stranger, on their tongue and then swallows it, is beyond my understanding. This action marks a complete breakdown of education during their upbringing.

Parents don't need pill-testers, they need to work on being better parents before sending their offspring out into the world. 

THEY need to swallow a large dose of reality before charging forward and accusing others of the mistakes THEY made. THEY are partly responsible for their children's errors when they make them. THEY need to educate their boys and girls about the true meaning of 'safe'.

There is no 'safe' place - apart from the one at home. 

Everywhere else has certain amount of risk attached to it. It takes a while for a young person to put risk and safety together and then manage them wisely. Safety comes with guidance and practice. It's not a rite of passage simply because they're older. It's a work in progress for the rest of their lifetime.

If we're unable to teach our young this or spend the time showing them the right way, then expect dire consequences to occur from time to time. It's a fact of nature, not of law.

Stop complicating and muddying up the real issues at hand. Pill testing isn't the answer. It's the LAST link in a chain of mistakes made well before any drug reaches someone's mouth.

How about we concentrate on the first one, not the very last. Let's also embrace reality and consequence. If you take a drug (any drug) expect your body to react to it. That reaction could go either way.

How about we accept this and death, safety, pill popping, stupidity, errors and good/bad parenting as they are. Leave the pill-testing debate alone. It's not someone else's fault a teen dies from ingesting bad pills or too many of them. It's the pill swallow-er and their closest family members who are most at fault.

The rest of us are not.

Live with it. It's the truth.

Mourn the dead. Learn from the mistakes. Teach the others. Move on. 

-M


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