Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
future music festival
‘A recent US documentary took a simple eye dropper test kit to music festivals and found that more than half of what festival goers were buying and taking were not what they had paid for.’ Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
‘A recent US documentary took a simple eye dropper test kit to music festivals and found that more than half of what festival goers were buying and taking were not what they had paid for.’ Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

Teens are being used as guinea pigs in the synthetic drugs market. And police can't keep up

This article is more than 9 years old

The low volume, high frequency internet drugs market makes it hard for police to target. And even harder for teenagers to know what they’re taking

After Saturday’s Future Music Festival in Sydney, 177 people will face court on drugs charges, an increase on last year’s 140 arrests.

Yet police sniffer dogs, which have been shown to be little more than a psychological deterrent, are not detecting new and emerging drugs that are widely available in Australia.

These “new” drugs are freely available online and over the counter in NSW, despite amendments to the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act to include emerging psychoactive substances (EPS) over a year ago.

The NSW police attitude is that the legislative loophole, which allowed the legal sale of EPSs like the ones that killed Henry Kwan, is now closed.

If only that was the case for the open market.

Shortly after the laws were expanded in 2013, 21-year-old Daniel Skelly, an engineering student from Sydney’s northern beaches came home after work one Saturday afternoon. His parent’s were overseas on holidays and he had plans to meet up with his friends later that night.

At his computer desk, Daniel took a line of what he probably thought was cocaine he had bought on the internet, lay down on his parent’s bed and died alone.

His grief stricken mother, Alanna, is at a loss to understand her son’s death, particularly since the coroner found that the drugs in her son’s blood were only at “therapeutic levels”.

From all accounts, her son had only experimented with drugs, as most do. Daniel had either tapered, or was in the final stages of tapering, from a mild Xanax dependence at the time of his death.

His mother believes that the drugs that so quickly overwhelmed him that Saturday afternoon contained a toxic synthetic substitution and is demanding the coroner allow her to arrange independent testing. However, the NSW coroner’s office have told her that a full drug analysis is unwarranted and that such testing has a huge backlog and expense that must be prioritised.

‘“Thai tea”, bought over the counter in an adult bookshop tested in a laboratory showed that the active ingredient was an illegal synthetic cannabinoid called UR144.’

Police drug testing comes down to resources, outsourced in most cases, and their remit is to presumptively test for prosecution. The low volume, high frequency of drugs being bought over the internet keeps dealers evading the law. Meanwhile, the overwhelmed police are left to focus on what is breaking the law, rather than what could be making users have adverse reactions.

Ice became the big drug issue last year, particularly in rural towns without the clinical or counselling mechanisms to battle its growth. It is the “whale issue” for law enforcement. Busting the supply of ice by organised crime syndicates looks good on TV and may help to reduce crime in other areas.

While internet-distributed EPSs are considered a minnow from a law enforcement perspective, their global, mail-distributed business model is ubiquitous and appears to target young teens. Put it this way, your internet-savvy teenage son or daughter doesn’t need to know a bikie dealer to cheaply get their hands on an EPS.

A recent US documentary What’s in my Baggie took a simple eye dropper test kit to music festivals and found that more than half of what American festival goers were buying and taking were not what they had paid for quite often they had bought bath salts instead of MDMA.

We don’t have the same issue with bath salts in Australia, but we do have the same issue with synthetic substitution.

The NSW police are adamant that they will not and do not support basic consumer-end drugs testing kits. But they do agree that internet distribution is still “problematic”.

Silk Road was a hydra that has regrown more brazen heads. Compounds made in laboratories in India and China, rejected for patents by pharmaceutical companies for having psychotropic effects, somehow end up on the black market via the internet.

Michelle Williams, a PHD candidate at Newcastle University says it’s particularly impressionable teens subject to peer pressure who are being used as unsuspecting guinea pigs.

There are many suspicious sellers openly peddling snake oil teas. These packets are often labelled as “tea” or “party pills”. Some are appealingly labelled “sky thyme” or “mellow yellow”, others are more disturbingly labelled with “mind rape”.

They promise a negligent array of benefits, such as relief from mild depression, anxiety, tension and stress to feelings of “euphoria or a world of fantasy.”

These drugs are not just available online. I’ve found them available over the counter in NSW.

“Thai tea”, bought over the counter in an adult bookshop just outside Sydney, comprehensively tested in a laboratory showed that the active ingredient was an illegal synthetic cannabinoid called UR144. Little toxicological data is available for UR144 but it is linked to a similar compound that is known to cause kidney damage.

One pathologist I spoke to, who did not what to be identified, does workplace testing in the mines in far north Queensland and says she regularly tests mine workers who clearly present as high, yet the standardised drug tests come back clean.

Williams says synthesisation of new drugs is moving so fast that it’s like “stopping a freight train”. Emergency room clinicians say they are presented with patients who say they have taken one thing, but are having an adverse reaction to something different. Something unknown. All they can do is offer supportive care.

These clinicians are operating in isolation, meaning their experiences of adverse reactions are not made collective to benefit other doctors in other hospitals.

We clearly need a coordinated national effort to combat this trade that attempts to leverage teenage peer pressure and profit from it.

Daniel’s father, Greg, fell into depression after his son’s death and says he tried to drink himself to death. Over a year after Daniel’s death and somewhat recovered, he now tells other parents to hack into their children’s computers, phones and put a lock on the letterbox.

Watch Andy Park’s investigation on The Feed on SBS 2 tonight at 7.30pm.

Most viewed

Most viewed