Page 5457 - Week 14 - Thursday, 30 November 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Ms Fitzharris obviously went to him and said, “We are going to support you, Shane, but could you just keep that out for now. We do not want everybody to know that this is what we are actually going to be rolling out in every dance party and every night venue across Canberra. We do not want to let them know that that is what we are doing yet.” But that is clearly what is happening. We object to this on those grounds, but also on the grounds of expert medical advice, which we have not cherry-picked like Mr Rattenbury does, and the legal advice that is widely available.
I will go firstly to the medical issues. The fact is that there are many medical voices who raise genuine concerns about what is happening here. I go to ones that do not have a political agenda, do not have an agenda that is sympathetic to the Greens. Let us go to the president of the national AMA. He is a pretty authoritative source, I would have thought. The president of the national AMA, Dr Michael Gannon, recently said:
We do need to do better but we also need real evidence that something works … the last thing we would want to do is give people a false sense of security about taking illegal drugs cooked up in someone’s bath tub.
The national president of the AMA has genuine and real concerns about this half-baked policy being put forward by the Greens and the Labor Party.
In a recent report entitled “Oversold pill testing not a magic bullet”, toxicologist Andrew Leibie from Safework Laboratories said:
… public statements made by politicians that the trial would help “keep people safe” were potentially misleading because the testing had limitations.
He questioned the reliability of on-site drug testing, saying he was not convinced that it would be able to accurately test for potency and detect dangerous new designer drugs. In an article on 20 January this year he said:
On-site pill testing kits are severely limited in what they detect … They may indicate that a pill contains MDMA, or ecstasy, but they will not pick up other contaminants. The greatest concern however, is that on-site tests cannot detect new designer drugs on the market … They …potentially leave consumers with a false sense of security that the party drugs they buy may be safe. It could be a deadly assumption.
Another article on 7 December said:
… the whole concept is based on the false assumption that if you do know what you’re taking, it is safe … that is absolutely untrue … MDMA is not a safe drug and many of the deaths that have occurred across Europe this year have actually been due to MDMA …
Due to MDMA, not other substances.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video