January 9, 2024 • 14 mins
Over the weekend, nine people were taken to hospital in critical condition from the Hardmission Festival at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne. Seven of these people were placed into an induced coma. So what went wrong? To find out we speak to Danny Hill, the Secretary of the Victorian Ambulance Union.
Hosts: Sam Koslowski and Billi FitzSimons
Producer: James Elliott
Guest: Danny Hill, Secretary of the Victorian Ambulance Union
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bunjelung Cargoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Wednesday,
the tenth of January. I'm Sam, I'm Billy. On Saturday night,
ten thousand revelers flocked to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne who
attend the Hard Mission Music festival. Hours later, nine young
people were rushed to hospital, including seven placed in induced
comas because of a reaction consistent with an MDMA overdose
(00:51):
or poisoned batch of the drug. Today, three of those
people are still fighting for life in hospital. On today's podcast,
I talked to the General secret Free of the Victoria
Ambulance Union, Danny Hill, about what happened on Saturday night
and what Victoria's paramedics think should be done to avoid
a similar incident happening in the future. The first Billy
what is making headlines this morning.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
In an interview with ABC Brisbane, Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi
has said he's considering a separate reserve force designed to
respond to natural disasters to alleviate pressures on the Australian
Defense Force. However, Albanzi also said quote, when you have
a natural disaster, you have to be flexible enough to
use whatever assets are at your disposal. It comes after
(01:34):
a review last year into Australia's disaster responses warrant of
significant implications for the Defense Force if they continue to
be required to respond to natural disasters.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Australians made a record number of complaints to the financial
watchdog in twenty twenty three. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority
received over one hundred thousand complaints last year. Nearly nine
thousand of these complaints were related to scams, which is
ninety five percent higher than twenty twenty two. The CEO
of the Authority has said that the number of complaints
(02:05):
is increasing at quote an unsustainable rate.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Pope Francis has called for a global ban on sarrogacy,
saying quote a child is always a gift and never
the basis of a commercial contract. In a prepared statement,
the leader of the Catholic Church said sarrogacy was a
deplorable practice and it represented a grave violation of the
dignity of the woman and the child. It was part
of a long speech made to Vatican accredited diplomats, in
(02:31):
a speech often referred to as the Pope's State of
the World.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Address and Today's good News. An animal shelter in Poland
has successfully found warm homes for about three hundred dogs
who were freezing outside because there wasn't enough space for
them inside the shelter amid temperatures as low as minus
twenty degrees celsius. Calling it Operation Frost, the shelter said
they are extremely grateful and moved by the response from
(02:56):
the public to temporarily house the dogs. Okay, Billy, So
for today's podcast, I sat down with Danny Hill. Now,
he's the General secretary for the Victoria Ambulance Union and
I wanted to talk to him about what happened at
the Hard Mission Music Festival on Saturday night in Melbourne.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I've actually never heard of this festival. Before we get
into the chat, can you give me just a bit
of context about the.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Festival it's a new one for Australia and it describes
itself as an electronic music event characterized by hard style,
hardcore and exceptional production. So the event was attended by
about ten thousand people at Melbourne's Flemington Race Course. Now,
an important note before we get into this chat. According
to Victorian Major Events Minister Steve Demopolos, the Poison Center
(03:43):
are still diagnosing what caused the hospitalization of nine people
from the festival, but as I talk about with Danny,
the symptoms are consistent with a negative reaction to MDMA.
Here's that chat now. So, Danny, thanks so much for
joining us on the podcast this morning.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Thank you, thanks for me.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Can you give us a rundown on what happened at
the Hard Mission Festival in Melbourne on Saturday night?
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Sure?
Speaker 5 (04:06):
So, I've spoken to a few of the paramedics who
were there. They're obviously mostly our members, and it was busy,
it was hot. I think they said around ten thousand
people could have been there at one point. But I
had quite a few people coming forward with as would
normally happen at a venue like that, coming forward with
different issues requiring first aid, issues related to the heats
there are a number of things like that, but eight
(04:26):
of them, eight people come forward or were brought forward
or had to be attended to buy the medical teams
that were there with a skyrocketing heart rate, skyrocketing blood pressure,
skyrocketing temperature so temperature over forty one degrees celsius, and
some of them even going into seizure activity.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
And it's a fairly consistent.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Pattern our members would see when they're dealing with rave
parties and things like that and people overdosing or having
reactions to MDMA type drugs. They obviously needed a quite
aggressive intervention from a ZONU centered. There were two emergency
doctors eed DOT who are actually on scene providing some
medical support there, but even they were overwhelmed and that's
where they had to call AV and MICA paramedics had
(05:08):
to intubate quite a number of the other patients that
the D doctors couldn't get to so that they could
be transported to hospital.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
And did it all happen quite quickly or is it
staggered over a number of hours.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
I'm told it was over about four hours, which may
seem like a long time, but what's called an RSI
a rapid sequence intubation. It's a resource. It's the sort
of thing that a full team would be dealing with
at a hospital, and even amongst paramedics, it'd be a
full team that would be dealing with doing a rapid
sequence intubation on a patient.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But to do eight of them over the.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Space of about four hours is a lot. It certainly
created a big workload for the members who were there.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
So was the sense amongst your members who were at
the events that they were under resourced or weren't given
the correct briefings by the event coordinators? Like, was there
any sense of catching up?
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Yeah, look, there was a sense of that. I think
that's something that the I'd imagine it's the Department of
Healthy would be in beststigating whether the right resources were
in place. The organizer has a responsibility to make sure
that you have a first aid provider, you have a
level of medical support. The feedback from our members is
that were certainly overwhelmed because really, it shouldn't require ambulances.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Will always be.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Called to transport these patients to the hospital, but it
shouldn't require ambulance paramedics. Certainly, that amount of ambulance paramedics
about twenty at one point being there to provide that
sort of support, So it's a combination of factors. Certainly,
they were obviously blindsided by the mass reaction, and that
is a fairly rare number of very severely critically unwell
(06:37):
patients to hit all at once.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
So can you remember a situation where there's as many
people caught up in the same overdose at one event.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
We've certainly had other events, other rave parties where there's
been a lot of people who have been affected by
drugs and needed transport to hospital. I don't think we've
had eight patients in one hit that needed to be
RSID sedated and intubated, so I think from that point
it would be one of the worst we've.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Had in some years.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
If ever, it's not an uncommon thing that you have
say one or two people that need to be intubated.
You might have one or two that are critically unwell
but need to go to hospital but don't need to
be intubated, and you might have a number of other
patients just under a variety of effects. But eight patients
that unwell I think is pretty rare, and it's a
sort of from a workload perspective, it's not unlike a
(07:24):
mass casualty road traffic accident or a bus accident with
a lot of patients in trauma, it's as far as
the resources that it brings in. It's actually a similar
resourcing issue. So they have to do what they would
do in one of those events, and they have to
call in additional paramedics to fill shifts. Because the event
happened in Flemington, they had to bring MICA paramedics. So
we have two main levels of paramedics in Victoria, Advanced
(07:46):
life support and then intensive care Mobile Intensive Care Paramedics MICA,
and they had to bring.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
MICA in from right across Melbourne in the.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
West to assist with those patients, and then that leaves
a gaping hole in their areas they would normally work,
so they've got to call additional paramedics in for that.
So it operationally, they have to manage it like it's
a giant road trauma.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And I'm sure there would have been a sense amongst
your members there that eight could very well have been
the tip of the iceberg here. I mean, we know
that MDMA is produced not in the dozens, but in
the hundreds or the thousands. What is the current advice
to young people across Victoria and indeed across the country
at the moment, on the back of the events of
(08:25):
the weekend.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
I mean, I'm sure people hear the say not a
drugs message a lot. These particular types of drugs really
are Russian rulette, and you do see paramedics are used
to seeing these sorts of reactions with this style of
drug and all drugs can cause all different types of reactions,
but these are really sick patients where they're heading towards
(08:46):
brain damage, stroke, heart attack as a result of their
blood pressure going super high, their heart rate going super high,
their temperature so some of the patients were above forty
one degrees celsius. One of the paramedics who was trying
to manage a patient's airway, the patient was seizing so
much that they couldn't maintain an airway what they call
tristmas where your jaw locks up, so they're trying to
(09:07):
manage that patient's airway and touching the patient's face was
like holding a heat pack, really really crook. And sure
all drugs have a reaction to them, but the combination
of reactions that are caused by MDMA style drugs are
just so deadly because it ups all that you have
chemicals in your body that make things go faster, your
heart pump harder. It puts those into overdrive. But the
(09:30):
chemicals in your body that are there to calm things
down and bring things down, they're blocked. So it's like
turning up the dial on a heater like an old
boiler heater, but turning off the safety valve at the
same time, and it can be catastrophic.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
So is the message from the union don't do drugs.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, that's obviously the message. If you could wave a
magic wand that would be what.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
It would be.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
But I think it's much more complicated than that, and
I think part of what we've got to break is
I'm sure there's clearly when as a paramedic, when work
with a lot of people who sadly use drugs, there's
sometimes amongst some people, I think, a misunderstanding that if
they're taking a pill, it's clean. I would never stick
a needle in my vein. I don't drink, but from
time to time I'll take a pill because that's clean.
(10:14):
And that just if you're a paramedic and you've seen
the reactions to some of these things. Some of these
drugs are far more dangerous, putting aside overdose amounts and
things like that happening with other drugs, they're far more
volatile and far more deadly. It can really be the
nightmare scenario for the paramedics having to deal with these patients. There.
Some of the most dynamic patients that our paramedics see
are the ones who take drugs like MDMA.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Does the Union think that pill testing should be an
option available to those attending these kind of rates.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah, definitely. It's not the panacea and it's not going
to fix everything, and some people will use it. I
don't think everyone will use it. As you rightly said,
these drugs are not made in batches of a dozen,
and they're made in batches of hundreds, if not thousands,
So there's many more out there today. And how do
people know what they're planning to take or what they're
taking is not the drug that caused the mayhem on
(11:05):
Saturday night. There's no way of knowing that. So there's
different models with pill testing. There's back of house pill
testing where you would advertise this particular drug is a
bad batch doing the rounds, and there's a little bit
of that can happen, But really I think it's about
trying to intercept the use of the drug as close
to the person taking the drug as you can. Sure
(11:26):
if people listen to this podcast or read the news,
they'd hear that message. But you want to get through
to people as close as you can and say that
particular drug, they're going to say that drug safe, that
they might say, Look, that particular drug is the really
bad one that caused the mayhem last weekend, and if
you take it, you could be exposed to that sort
of reaction that we saw. And some people are allergic
(11:46):
to certain types of drugs, and they may think that
the drug is not laced with anything, but some of
these drugs might be laced with fentanyl, the might be
laced with cocaine, other sorts of drugs. So at least
giving them the knowledge that they may have had a
bad reaction to when the past is included in that
pill might dissuade them from taking it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
It's interesting you mentioned that idea of mass broadcast warnings
at these kind of events when there is an issue unfolding.
I was reading through some of the social media conversations
that were happening around the festival, and there was this
discussion being had by people attending the festival about how
Victoria police weren't really involved in the response at all,
And then when you actually look at the media reporting,
(12:26):
they couldn't really know what was going on until about
lunchtime the next day. Do you think that there was
a breakdown in communication at some point along the way
that could have led to I don't want to dance
in hypotheticals too much, but could have led to a
mass broadcast of a message at the event saying ambulance
Victoria have experienced a number of these incidents. Now everyone
(12:49):
be careful.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
We broadcast Hey, this thunderstorm ASTHMA might be coming in
the next twenty four hours, so have your plan in place.
Why can't they say, look, where there's a bad batch
of MDMA going around, it looks like this the tablet
presents in this sort of way or this color, and
give people a heads up. And I think that's effectively.
That's the back of house pill testing model, is someone
somewhere knows what's in this stuff. Let's tell people what's
(13:13):
in it and let them know. Look that this is
a really bad variant of this drug. Don't take it.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
But until then, did any of your members report having
tried to get the support of police on the name.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Look, it probably wouldn't be.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
No, that wouldn't have been something that our members would
have been tasked with. They're there prearly to deal with.
One thing we don't want to encourage is typically with
any drug use is people being afraid to dial Ship
zero and call for an ambulance and they need help
because they're afraid of police being involved. So typically paramedics
will do that if there's a safety risk. If they
think there's an occupational violence risk, they will absolutely turn
(13:47):
out with police. But it wouldn't be unless there was
that safety risk that was there. Our members have got
quite a bit to focus on. But you're right, proper planning,
there's a lot you could look back at this and
say we can do a lot better.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Danny. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for
joining us this morning.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
My pleasure. Thanks, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Pill testing is a big topic for us and it's
one that we will continue to report on across the year.
We would love to know your thoughts on today's episode.
You can leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify,
or a review if you're listening on Apple. We will
be back again tomorrow, but until then, have a good day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bunjelung Cargoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Wednesday,
the tenth of January. I'm Sam, I'm Billy. On Saturday night,
ten thousand revelers flocked to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne who
attend the Hard Mission Music festival. Hours later, nine young
people were rushed to hospital, including seven placed in induced
comas because of a reaction consistent with an MDMA overdose
(00:51):
or poisoned batch of the drug. Today, three of those
people are still fighting for life in hospital. On today's podcast,
I talked to the General secret Free of the Victoria
Ambulance Union, Danny Hill, about what happened on Saturday night
and what Victoria's paramedics think should be done to avoid
a similar incident happening in the future. The first Billy
what is making headlines this morning.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
In an interview with ABC Brisbane, Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi
has said he's considering a separate reserve force designed to
respond to natural disasters to alleviate pressures on the Australian
Defense Force. However, Albanzi also said quote, when you have
a natural disaster, you have to be flexible enough to
use whatever assets are at your disposal. It comes after
(01:34):
a review last year into Australia's disaster responses warrant of
significant implications for the Defense Force if they continue to
be required to respond to natural disasters.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Australians made a record number of complaints to the financial
watchdog in twenty twenty three. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority
received over one hundred thousand complaints last year. Nearly nine
thousand of these complaints were related to scams, which is
ninety five percent higher than twenty twenty two. The CEO
of the Authority has said that the number of complaints
(02:05):
is increasing at quote an unsustainable rate.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Pope Francis has called for a global ban on sarrogacy,
saying quote a child is always a gift and never
the basis of a commercial contract. In a prepared statement,
the leader of the Catholic Church said sarrogacy was a
deplorable practice and it represented a grave violation of the
dignity of the woman and the child. It was part
of a long speech made to Vatican accredited diplomats, in
(02:31):
a speech often referred to as the Pope's State of
the World.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Address and Today's good News. An animal shelter in Poland
has successfully found warm homes for about three hundred dogs
who were freezing outside because there wasn't enough space for
them inside the shelter amid temperatures as low as minus
twenty degrees celsius. Calling it Operation Frost, the shelter said
they are extremely grateful and moved by the response from
(02:56):
the public to temporarily house the dogs. Okay, Billy, So
for today's podcast, I sat down with Danny Hill. Now,
he's the General secretary for the Victoria Ambulance Union and
I wanted to talk to him about what happened at
the Hard Mission Music Festival on Saturday night in Melbourne.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I've actually never heard of this festival. Before we get
into the chat, can you give me just a bit
of context about the.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Festival it's a new one for Australia and it describes
itself as an electronic music event characterized by hard style,
hardcore and exceptional production. So the event was attended by
about ten thousand people at Melbourne's Flemington Race Course. Now,
an important note before we get into this chat. According
to Victorian Major Events Minister Steve Demopolos, the Poison Center
(03:43):
are still diagnosing what caused the hospitalization of nine people
from the festival, but as I talk about with Danny,
the symptoms are consistent with a negative reaction to MDMA.
Here's that chat now. So, Danny, thanks so much for
joining us on the podcast this morning.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Thank you, thanks for me.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Can you give us a rundown on what happened at
the Hard Mission Festival in Melbourne on Saturday night?
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Sure?
Speaker 5 (04:06):
So, I've spoken to a few of the paramedics who
were there. They're obviously mostly our members, and it was busy,
it was hot. I think they said around ten thousand
people could have been there at one point. But I
had quite a few people coming forward with as would
normally happen at a venue like that, coming forward with
different issues requiring first aid, issues related to the heats
there are a number of things like that, but eight
(04:26):
of them, eight people come forward or were brought forward
or had to be attended to buy the medical teams
that were there with a skyrocketing heart rate, skyrocketing blood pressure,
skyrocketing temperature so temperature over forty one degrees celsius, and
some of them even going into seizure activity.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
And it's a fairly consistent.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Pattern our members would see when they're dealing with rave
parties and things like that and people overdosing or having
reactions to MDMA type drugs. They obviously needed a quite
aggressive intervention from a ZONU centered. There were two emergency
doctors eed DOT who are actually on scene providing some
medical support there, but even they were overwhelmed and that's
where they had to call AV and MICA paramedics had
(05:08):
to intubate quite a number of the other patients that
the D doctors couldn't get to so that they could
be transported to hospital.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
And did it all happen quite quickly or is it
staggered over a number of hours.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
I'm told it was over about four hours, which may
seem like a long time, but what's called an RSI
a rapid sequence intubation. It's a resource. It's the sort
of thing that a full team would be dealing with
at a hospital, and even amongst paramedics, it'd be a
full team that would be dealing with doing a rapid
sequence intubation on a patient.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But to do eight of them over the.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Space of about four hours is a lot. It certainly
created a big workload for the members who were there.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
So was the sense amongst your members who were at
the events that they were under resourced or weren't given
the correct briefings by the event coordinators? Like, was there
any sense of catching up?
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Yeah, look, there was a sense of that. I think
that's something that the I'd imagine it's the Department of
Healthy would be in beststigating whether the right resources were
in place. The organizer has a responsibility to make sure
that you have a first aid provider, you have a
level of medical support. The feedback from our members is
that were certainly overwhelmed because really, it shouldn't require ambulances.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Will always be.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Called to transport these patients to the hospital, but it
shouldn't require ambulance paramedics. Certainly, that amount of ambulance paramedics
about twenty at one point being there to provide that
sort of support, So it's a combination of factors. Certainly,
they were obviously blindsided by the mass reaction, and that
is a fairly rare number of very severely critically unwell
(06:37):
patients to hit all at once.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
So can you remember a situation where there's as many
people caught up in the same overdose at one event.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
We've certainly had other events, other rave parties where there's
been a lot of people who have been affected by
drugs and needed transport to hospital. I don't think we've
had eight patients in one hit that needed to be
RSID sedated and intubated, so I think from that point
it would be one of the worst we've.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Had in some years.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
If ever, it's not an uncommon thing that you have
say one or two people that need to be intubated.
You might have one or two that are critically unwell
but need to go to hospital but don't need to
be intubated, and you might have a number of other
patients just under a variety of effects. But eight patients
that unwell I think is pretty rare, and it's a
sort of from a workload perspective, it's not unlike a
(07:24):
mass casualty road traffic accident or a bus accident with
a lot of patients in trauma, it's as far as
the resources that it brings in. It's actually a similar
resourcing issue. So they have to do what they would
do in one of those events, and they have to
call in additional paramedics to fill shifts. Because the event
happened in Flemington, they had to bring MICA paramedics. So
we have two main levels of paramedics in Victoria, Advanced
(07:46):
life support and then intensive care Mobile Intensive Care Paramedics MICA,
and they had to bring.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
MICA in from right across Melbourne in the.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
West to assist with those patients, and then that leaves
a gaping hole in their areas they would normally work,
so they've got to call additional paramedics in for that.
So it operationally, they have to manage it like it's
a giant road trauma.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And I'm sure there would have been a sense amongst
your members there that eight could very well have been
the tip of the iceberg here. I mean, we know
that MDMA is produced not in the dozens, but in
the hundreds or the thousands. What is the current advice
to young people across Victoria and indeed across the country
at the moment, on the back of the events of
(08:25):
the weekend.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
I mean, I'm sure people hear the say not a
drugs message a lot. These particular types of drugs really
are Russian rulette, and you do see paramedics are used
to seeing these sorts of reactions with this style of
drug and all drugs can cause all different types of reactions,
but these are really sick patients where they're heading towards
(08:46):
brain damage, stroke, heart attack as a result of their
blood pressure going super high, their heart rate going super high,
their temperature so some of the patients were above forty
one degrees celsius. One of the paramedics who was trying
to manage a patient's airway, the patient was seizing so
much that they couldn't maintain an airway what they call
tristmas where your jaw locks up, so they're trying to
(09:07):
manage that patient's airway and touching the patient's face was
like holding a heat pack, really really crook. And sure
all drugs have a reaction to them, but the combination
of reactions that are caused by MDMA style drugs are
just so deadly because it ups all that you have
chemicals in your body that make things go faster, your
heart pump harder. It puts those into overdrive. But the
(09:30):
chemicals in your body that are there to calm things
down and bring things down, they're blocked. So it's like
turning up the dial on a heater like an old
boiler heater, but turning off the safety valve at the
same time, and it can be catastrophic.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
So is the message from the union don't do drugs.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, that's obviously the message. If you could wave a
magic wand that would be what.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
It would be.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
But I think it's much more complicated than that, and
I think part of what we've got to break is
I'm sure there's clearly when as a paramedic, when work
with a lot of people who sadly use drugs, there's
sometimes amongst some people, I think, a misunderstanding that if
they're taking a pill, it's clean. I would never stick
a needle in my vein. I don't drink, but from
time to time I'll take a pill because that's clean.
(10:14):
And that just if you're a paramedic and you've seen
the reactions to some of these things. Some of these
drugs are far more dangerous, putting aside overdose amounts and
things like that happening with other drugs, they're far more
volatile and far more deadly. It can really be the
nightmare scenario for the paramedics having to deal with these patients. There.
Some of the most dynamic patients that our paramedics see
are the ones who take drugs like MDMA.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Does the Union think that pill testing should be an
option available to those attending these kind of rates.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah, definitely. It's not the panacea and it's not going
to fix everything, and some people will use it. I
don't think everyone will use it. As you rightly said,
these drugs are not made in batches of a dozen,
and they're made in batches of hundreds, if not thousands,
So there's many more out there today. And how do
people know what they're planning to take or what they're
taking is not the drug that caused the mayhem on
(11:05):
Saturday night. There's no way of knowing that. So there's
different models with pill testing. There's back of house pill
testing where you would advertise this particular drug is a
bad batch doing the rounds, and there's a little bit
of that can happen, But really I think it's about
trying to intercept the use of the drug as close
to the person taking the drug as you can. Sure
(11:26):
if people listen to this podcast or read the news,
they'd hear that message. But you want to get through
to people as close as you can and say that
particular drug, they're going to say that drug safe, that
they might say, Look, that particular drug is the really
bad one that caused the mayhem last weekend, and if
you take it, you could be exposed to that sort
of reaction that we saw. And some people are allergic
(11:46):
to certain types of drugs, and they may think that
the drug is not laced with anything, but some of
these drugs might be laced with fentanyl, the might be
laced with cocaine, other sorts of drugs. So at least
giving them the knowledge that they may have had a
bad reaction to when the past is included in that
pill might dissuade them from taking it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
It's interesting you mentioned that idea of mass broadcast warnings
at these kind of events when there is an issue unfolding.
I was reading through some of the social media conversations
that were happening around the festival, and there was this
discussion being had by people attending the festival about how
Victoria police weren't really involved in the response at all,
And then when you actually look at the media reporting,
(12:26):
they couldn't really know what was going on until about
lunchtime the next day. Do you think that there was
a breakdown in communication at some point along the way
that could have led to I don't want to dance
in hypotheticals too much, but could have led to a
mass broadcast of a message at the event saying ambulance
Victoria have experienced a number of these incidents. Now everyone
(12:49):
be careful.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
We broadcast Hey, this thunderstorm ASTHMA might be coming in
the next twenty four hours, so have your plan in place.
Why can't they say, look, where there's a bad batch
of MDMA going around, it looks like this the tablet
presents in this sort of way or this color, and
give people a heads up. And I think that's effectively.
That's the back of house pill testing model, is someone
somewhere knows what's in this stuff. Let's tell people what's
(13:13):
in it and let them know. Look that this is
a really bad variant of this drug. Don't take it.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
But until then, did any of your members report having
tried to get the support of police on the name.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Look, it probably wouldn't be.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
No, that wouldn't have been something that our members would
have been tasked with. They're there prearly to deal with.
One thing we don't want to encourage is typically with
any drug use is people being afraid to dial Ship
zero and call for an ambulance and they need help
because they're afraid of police being involved. So typically paramedics
will do that if there's a safety risk. If they
think there's an occupational violence risk, they will absolutely turn
(13:47):
out with police. But it wouldn't be unless there was
that safety risk that was there. Our members have got
quite a bit to focus on. But you're right, proper planning,
there's a lot you could look back at this and
say we can do a lot better.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Danny. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for
joining us this morning.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
My pleasure. Thanks, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Pill testing is a big topic for us and it's
one that we will continue to report on across the year.
We would love to know your thoughts on today's episode.
You can leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify,
or a review if you're listening on Apple. We will
be back again tomorrow, but until then, have a good day.
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