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Music festival pill-testers continue to skirt the truth in their campaign to expand their services beyond Canberra. At last weekend’s Splendour in the Grass music festival at Byron Bay in northern NSW, the equipment was again on show, with claims that lives are saved with testing.
Testing is about identifying deadly contaminants, but the inconvenient truth out of the NSW coronial inquest into the series of drug deaths at music festivals is all deaths were due to an ecstasy (MDMA) overdose combined with environmental factors such as the weather, hydration and other drugs.
But it gets worse. Under sustained questioning last weekend, Canberra emergency physician and testing proponent David Caldicott continued to muddy the waters, claiming that upgrading to more advanced gas chromatography (GCMS) would allow more accurate measuring of the dosage.
It fell to toxicologists to mop up with the details, explaining that GCMS could establish dose only with additional testing and infrastructure — in other words, transporting expensive mobile laboratories to every music festival in the country. To determine an actual MDMA dose, the entire pill needs to be sacrificed for testing, defeating the point of the test for users who want their expensive pill back. Only suppliers with batches to sell would benefit
Caldicott’s methods open up a canyon of concerns, defended on the flimsiest of grounds — that it’s done overseas. Australia’s festival temperatures can be double Amsterdam’s, presenting serious risks of hyperthermia and dehydration. Combining even small MDMA doses with caffeine, alcohol and other drugs here can be lethal. So many consume pills before arriving at events that about a tenth of ACT clients required a second assessment to determine if they were too intoxicated to counsel.
Startlingly, the ACT trial had no age check to prevent minors being counselled or police checks to prevent suppliers sending in samples of their inventory for assessment.
The decision to discard pills is left to the user, which opens up possibilities such as on-selling, cocktailing with other drugs in an attempt to dilute the danger or, worse, retribution against festival dealers who supply about a third of the material.
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The NRMA-owned Manly Fast Ferry has confirmed it stood some deckhands down after they tested "non-negative" for illicit drugs on Monday, as revealed by the Herald's CBD column on Friday.
With fewer staff available, the NRMA said it had been forced to reduce the frequency of some of its tourist services that travel between stops including Taronga Zoo and Darling Harbour on Friday.
But a spokeswoman said Manly to Circular services were unaffected and it expects normal schedule times to operate across the weekend.
"Some deckhand staff returned non-negative results and others who did not make themselves available for the random drug test have been stood down indefinitely," a NRMA spokeswoman said.
"We’ve done this to give our passengers assurance around safety and that we have a zero tolerance policy around illicit drug use," the spokeswoman said.
The NRMA, which operates 11 fast ferry vessels through a subsidiary, is locked in a dispute with the Maritime Union over worker pay which has lasted for months.
About 80 fast ferry workers have gone on strike several times this year in a campaign for higher wages after an enterprise agreement was struck down in January.
An NRMA spokeswoman said the CFMMEU, of which the Maritime Union is a part, was notified when the staff were stood down.
But the spokeswoman declined to say how many ferry workers were stood down or what drugs were allegedly in their system because the company has not informed other workers. It is understood that will happen on Monday.
The Maritime Union declined to comment.
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Popcorn lung is a rare condition that causes airway scarring due to inflammation and eventually lung damage. Popcorn lung is characterized by the lung tissue scarring and becoming narrow. This can lead to breathing problems. Popcorn lung is a rare medical condition that damages the bronchioles, the lung's smallest airways.
Breathing in harmful chemicals, particles, or toxins can lead to popcorn lung. Food-flavoring fumes produced during the manufacture of candies, potato chips, popcorn, and dairy products, are major culprits. The chemicals found in e-cigarette liquid, known as "e-juice," may be a potential cause of popcorn lung. According to the American Lung Association, using electronic cigarettes or vaping, particularly the flavored varieties, can cause popcorn lung.
While treatments exist to limit and manage symptoms, currently there is no cure for popcorn lung, and it is considered life-threatening.
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Electronic Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction Among Adults: The use of e-cigarettes is associated with an increased risk of having had an MI. Dual use of e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes is riskier than the sole use of either product.
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At a smart dinner party, where cocaine is passed around like canapes, the wealthy guests likely do not think about the class A drug’s dark origins.
Behind these decadent suburban scenes are the end result of a supply chain that involves environmental devastation, violence, high-level corruption and crimes including gang warfare, sex trafficking and terrorism.
And it is why Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick told middle-class drug users that they had “blood on their hands”.
Police Federation deputy treasurer Simon Kempton heaped blame on wealthy middle class people for the boom in class A drug sales.
He said: “If you look at why there is a market for cocaine from South America it is because people who can afford it are buying it and fuelling the problem. “Street-level users are a problem because they steal to fund their habit. But on their own they will not support an organised-crime group.
“The big market is people with money to spend and they are often oblivious to the misery they cause because it is not on their doorstep.
“Middle-class drug users do not come across the radar of police because they are consuming it behind closed doors. There’s a lack of personal responsibility.”
Far from a victimless crime, taking cocaine leaves bloody footsteps and even death from the streets in our town and across the world.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/blood-hands-decadent-drug-users-16491263