The police warning over a "bad batch" of illicit drugs circulating in the territory highlighted the need for a well-resourced and permanent testing capability to underpin any proposed decriminalisation of illicit drugs in the ACT.
Pill testing proponent, emergency department physician and ANU Associate Professor Dr David Caldicott said a decriminalised Canberra drug market would need to be "skimmed" by a rigorous testing program "looking for particularly bad or dangerous products".
"The trick is to identify really dangerous things as they come onto the market before they cause an overt amount of harm," Dr Caldicott said.
In the most recent incident, police released information that a very harmful substance was being sold in the ACT as "synthetic cocaine". The product was understood to be a mixture of fentanyl and heroin, combined with cocaine. One Canberra teenager was admitted to intensive care with a severe reaction.
ACT Health also warned of an ecstasy contamination with a hallucinogenic substance known as "NBOMe", after several people were taken to hospital.
The morphine derivative fentanyl was developed by a Belgian chemist Paul Janssen. Like morphine, it binds with a receptor in the brain for pain relief and through the 1960s and 70s was a widely used anaesthetic.
Many fentanyl analogues were also produced and have made their way into the illicit drug market. Carfentanil, the veterinary medicine, can be 100 times more powerful than fentanyl and 5000 times more potent than heroin.
According to Ben Westhoff's book Fentanyl Inc, published in 2019, carfentanil was responsible for more than 1100 deaths of recreational users in Ohio in less than a year.
Dr Caldicott, who gave evidence to the select committee informing the proposed Pettersson Bill to decriminalise possession of personal quantities of illicit synthetic drugs, said pill testing at music festivals, which has been piloted in the ACT but was opposed in other jurisdictions, "was not liked by the [drug] dealers".
"In the many arguments that have been mounted against pill testing before we got it off the ground, one of them was that we were facilitating the dealers which is, of course, nonsense," he said.
"The dealers of drugs do not want the purest, highest-quality 'champagne' product being delivered around their jurisdiction of consumers, they want the cheapest possible product.
"They want the biggest bang for buck they can get.
"What drug-checking does is it very clearly demonstrates when a market is tainted. We unmask that which is often assumed but never proven, in a way that is irrefutable."
Dr Caldicott, like other physicians who gave evidence to the ACT Assembly select committee, expressed his full support for a harm minimisation approach.
Dr Tito Wheatland, from the Health Care Consumers Association, told the committee that both for people who were suffering from addiction and for people who were recreational users, "if you do not have some quality in relation to the supply of the drugs, you will end up having an unmeasurable risk of harm each time someone uses drugs".
Dr Wheatland flagged substituting for the illegal drug supply "the use of prescriptions of similar drugs that have the same sort of efficacy", but admitted this pathway was fraught with legislative conflict with federal laws and would only work with the support of the federal health-funded Therapeutic Goods Administration.
