The war on drugs continues as police note the “staggering” amount of drug users at a recent dance music festival. Thanks, Constable Duh!
It’s a contentious issue and one which we recently discussed with journalist Lisa Pryor, a 2011 Festival of Dangerous Ideas speaker and author of A Small Book About Drugs. Among numerous data driven insights which suggest drug use should be treated as a health and education issue as opposed to a criminal one, Pryor had this to say about the police presence at music festivals: “I imagine police officers under say, 35, would be well aware of what’s going on and would maybe feel foolish or sheepish sometimes about what they have to do. But older people and the people in charge of them have a totally different perspective and might not understand how normal it is to take drugs like marijuana and ecstasy at a music festival.”
Such was the case when police arrested 42 punters at Melbourne Parklife yesterday, with only two of that forty-two interviewed in relation to drug trafficking. Besides being gloriously inefficient (sixty officers and two dogs were used), the most “staggering” part of that stat is that police apprehended just two drug traffickers out of a possible 17,000 attendees. Could it be that sniffer dogs are ineffective at catching drug traffickers? Umm, yeah. In fact they’re terrible. In 2006 an independent report conducted by the NSW Ombudsman criticized the use of sniffer dogs at music festivals saying they were terrible at catching drug traffickers and excellent at catching paranoid teenage stoners: “Our review found that despite the best efforts of police officers, the use of drug detection dogs has proven to be an ineffective tool for detecting drug dealers. Overwhelmingly, the use of drug detection dogs has led to public searches of individuals in which no drugs were found, or to the detection of (mostly young) adults in possession of very small amounts of cannabis for personal use.”
The report also detailed the most alarming by-product of using sniffer dogs at music festivals: the threat of overdose from those (again, mostly young people) who feared detection. And yet, despite all the data on the subject (also, common sense) police refuse to acknowledge that sniffer dogs simply do not curb drug use, they just alter the pattern of consumption. Sometimes in ways which are less safe for punters. In 2009, 17-year-old Gemma Thoms famously died after taking three ecstasy tablets at once because she feared they could be detected by sniffer dogs.
So basically it’s inefficient and dangerous, and police still insist on conducting what is largely considered a PR exercise. In what other sector would this be tolerated?
“We have made our presence as big and well publicised as possible. We are right at the entrance to the event, yet people still keep trying to get away with it,” Acting Inspector Don Brown said. “It’s really staggering we are getting these arrest numbers and it is worrying because it means youngsters are not listening and if it continues in these large numbers, it will be a terrible summer.”
Prepare for the worst summer ever, Don.
