Premier Gladys Berejilkian, the NSW liberal leader so nanny state that she literally refers to her adult constituents as “kids”, thinks pill-testing is bad.
So much so that her party has threatened to shut down every music festival in the state before they’d even consider allowing the proven-to-be-lifesaving measures to be trialled.
So naturally, her latest anti-pill testing rant has been remixed into a scorching hardstyle banger.
ICYMI: Gladys recently vowed to shut down the Defqon.1 dance festival after two people died and three more were hospitalised in a critical condition following the Sydney event earlier this month, and in a fiery rant blaming the event itself for the tragedy, she claimed that anyone advocating for pill testing as a solution to help stop fatal overdoses was “giving the green light to drugs”.
In response, two local hardstyle producers — N3bula and Twisted Melodiez — have decided to immortalise her staunch words in song, morphing them into a turnt AF EDM remix dubbed ‘Shut This Down’, which has already clocked up a grandiose 133K views on Facebook.
Check it out:
The banger-jiklian arrives after Gladys convened an expert panel to help instruct her government on how to make music festivals safer. Interestingly, the panel contains zero representatives from the actual music industry, but does contain a representative from the government’s own Office of Liquor & Gaming.
Gladys has also declared that she will not consider pill-testing as an option to help reduce drug casualties at events, regardless of whether or not the expert panel tells her to (which it probably won’t because reasons mentioned above).
Meanwhile, a group of over 60 Aussie festivals, musicians, health specialists and industry figures have issued an open letter to Gladys, urging her to begin an “open dialogue” instead of — ya know — shutting everything down.
The father of a young man who suffered a fatal drug overdose at Defqon.1 three years ago has also come out against her government’s threat to shut down the festival.
Gladys’s ant-pill testing rant also featured the claim that “there is no such thing as a safe drug and unfortunately when young people think there is, it has tragic consequences”, which has been proven categorically false by ABC Fact Checkers , with RMIT researchers previously demonstrating that the conservative catch-cry that pill-testing leads to more deaths is utter bullsh*t.
“There is no evidence that pill-testing results in festival attendees and partygoers taking more drugs and dying as a consequence,” researcher Claudia Long says. “There is evidence to suggest that pill-testing can make some users more likely to dispose of their drugs or take smaller quantities of them.”
And we certainly saw these findings in action earlier this year when Australia’s first pill-testing facility was trialled at Groovin The Moo Canberra.
While the landmark trial came back with some disturbing details about some of the 83 drugs tested, the upshot of those results was that many of the punters who owned the bad drugs decided to bin them rather than risk their lives, causing many commentators to hail the whole thing a big success.
