The enquiry by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) into police action at the Splendour in the Grass music festival has moved beyond the legality of strip searches to discover drugs and unearthed alarming discrepancies on what happens when illicit drugs are discovered.
The enquiry heard that one music attendee was found to have 0.4g of MDMA but this was recorded on the arrest form as 3.18 grams which brought it from personal use to the much more serious " trafficable quantity ". There was a high chance that such a quantity would result in a prison sentence. The officer who made this mistake could not explain the discrepancy beyond saying " It is quite easy to get muddled up ".
A person with legal training who manned a free legal advice booth at the festival reported that police frequently handed out a form to those caught with minor amounts of drugs which would allow them to post in a formal guilty plea. It was suggested that this would allow the magistrate to dismiss a charge without recording a conviction, which is known in court circles as a " Section 10 ".
The police are not in a position to speculate on how a magistrate will view a case appearing before him or her. Some people not appearing before a court could be viewed as not taking the charges seriously and in the mind of some magistrates drugs at a music festival could be interpreted as ignoring the explicit warnings that precede such events. Simply mailing in a guilty plea invited an unknown view by the magistrate.
One thing that is becoming quite clear is the change in police attitude to drugs and the methods used to screen crowds at music festivals. This changed markedly from 2018 and now it is like a military operation with a mass of uniformed police accompanies by sniffer dogs forming a barrier through which entrants must proceed. Hanging in the air is the threat that anyone can be randomly selected - and ordered to undertake a strip search.
The hidden issue behind all this drug controversy is whether or not to allow drugs in the possession of music festival patrons to be tested. For that to happen, as amnesty around the testing facility would be required and watching police would not be allowed to intercept patrons walking away from that facility. Drug testing can never be entirely reliable, but it would help to screen out the more lethal rubbish brewed and sold by underground drug laboratories.
When someone dies at a music festival there are usually one of two causes. They had the misfortune to buy a lethal concoction sold by an incompetent drug cook, or they overdosed on what would have been a perfectly safe drug if taken in a responsible quantity. That may happen in response to fright at the presence of police - or in a vain search for the purity of that elusive " high " that is the reason people take drugs.
The one thing that is now perfectly clear is that the public will evade whatever restrictions are imposed and continue to take drugs at music festivals. Pill testing is the lesser evil. It doers not deliver the ultimate safety, but it is a vast improvement on what serves as drug screening presently happening on the drug scene.
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