Georgina Bartter: How can we stop another tragic drug death?
BEHIND the picturesque setting, an ugly tragedy emerged.
Sydney’s Harbourlife festival had started off like any other dance event, with music, friends and fun.
As the crowd heaved under clear blue skies, the city’s iconic bridge and opera house provided the perfect backdrop.
But beyond the glistening harbour, beyond the sunglass-clad revellers, a tragedy was unfolding.
Georgina Bartter, 19, had been dancing with friends at the harbourside event last Saturday.
She had taken one and a half purple pills — what she thought was ecstasy, friends say.
She started getting tired and was shivering.
One person saw her doubled over and foaming at the mouth.
Irish national Owen Mullins stopped to ask if she was okay. She didn’t respond. He raised the alarm.
“Her lips were blue and I knew something wasn’t right when I saw her shivering in the heat while rocking forward and back,” Mr Mullins said.
At 4.37pm, Georgina collapsed. She later passed away at St Vincent’s Hospital.
Sydney’s Harbourlife festival had started off like any other dance event, with music, friends and fun.
As the crowd heaved under clear blue skies, the city’s iconic bridge and opera house provided the perfect backdrop.
But beyond the glistening harbour, beyond the sunglass-clad revellers, a tragedy was unfolding.
Georgina Bartter, 19, had been dancing with friends at the harbourside event last Saturday.
She had taken one and a half purple pills — what she thought was ecstasy, friends say.
She started getting tired and was shivering.
One person saw her doubled over and foaming at the mouth.
Irish national Owen Mullins stopped to ask if she was okay. She didn’t respond. He raised the alarm.
“Her lips were blue and I knew something wasn’t right when I saw her shivering in the heat while rocking forward and back,” Mr Mullins said.
At 4.37pm, Georgina collapsed. She later passed away at St Vincent’s Hospital.
By nightfall, the Bartter family was grieving the loss of a young life cut horribly short by a suspected overdose.
‘She was a beautiful and vibrant young woman who was much loved and will be sadly missed,” the Bartter family said in a statement.
“She had allergies and it was extremely out of character.”
A promising young woman, Georgina was an accounting student and, friends say, “the life of the party”.
The eldest of three children, she graduated from a top Sydney private school last year where her former principal described her as a gorgeous and bright young woman with an infectious sense of humour.
Sydney City Local Area Commander Mark Walton said drug offences at music festivals had become worryingly common.
He pointed out that young people wanted to know the content of everything they ate, yet no-one ever knew what was in any illicit drug.
That’s the thing about illegal drug labs — there is no quality control.
Georgina’s death comes little more than a year after the death of Bayswater man James Munro, 23, after a suspected drug overdose at Sydney’s Defqon 1.
Between December, 2012, and March, 2013, Victoria Police caught more than 420 people for drug-related offences over the summer live music circuit.
Australia has the highest proportion of ecstasy users in the world.
According to Australia Bureau of Statistics data commissioned by the Penington Institute, in the last decade to 2012, accidental drug overdoses have claimed 7923 lives.
ADRIANA Buccianti has never met the Bartter family and did not know Georgina.
But the young woman’s death has been heart-wrenching for the Epping mum.
She knows the Bartter family’s pain is insurmountable, that losing a child “defies all universal laws”.
Ms Buccianti lost her own son, Daniel, to drugs at Beaufort’s Rainbow Serpent Festival almost three years ago.
“It’s almost like reliving your pain all over again,” Ms Buccianti says.
“This has made me extremely nervous. The dance parties are only just starting.”
She had tried to talk her Daz out of going to the festival. She had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was not right. Call it mother’s intuition.
“He called me on the Saturday night. It was a really hot day. He said ‘mum, I’ve taken some really bad acid’.”
The 34-year-old had also, he told her, taken ecstasy that night.
She urged him to see St John Ambulance and started trying to work out how she was going to get to the festival to collect him.
But less than an hour later he reported that he was fine.
“His last words to me were ‘I’m OK, I’ve been to see the chill-out tent, everything’s fine. I will see you on Monday.’
“I got that dreaded knock on the door at eight o’clock on the Sunday morning from the police to tell me that Daniel had died and everything possible had been done. My whole world just fell apart.”
When Daniel died Ms Buccianti was angry. She wanted the festival shut down and drug use stamped out.
As time has passed, so has Ms Buccanti.
She has been to the past two Rainbow Serpent festivals to talk to young people about being careful and looking after each other.
“We can’t stop people taking things, it’s as simple as that. In terms of the war on drugs, we have lost the plot. We need to rethink the whole thing.”
Ms Buccianti believes drugs should be legalised and made by reputable laboratories rather than “these scumbags who put garbage in them”.
Something needs to be done, she says. One child dead is too many.
VICTORIAN of the Year Professor David Penington has proposed a system where people over the age of 16 could sign up to a national register and would then be allowed to purchase cannabis or ecstasy from an approved government supplier.
The supplier, probably a pharmacist, would give advice and be able to refer people to counselling or treatment.
“Prohibition has not stopped the availability of drugs in the community,” Prof Penington says.
“For 50 years they have been readily available to anybody who wants to find them.
“The consequence of that is they are used without any sort of control.”
Prof Penington says prohibition “forces people to get into the hands of illicit drug traffickers that peddle things that are cheap and easy to provide and have no recognition of safety issues”.
Dan Burns, of DanceWize, believes a regulated market needs further exploration.
“I think we need to start having this discussion ... discussing potential solutions and trialing them,” Ms Burns says.
He says the stigma around drug use means people are less inclined to seek medical attention if they run into trouble at a festival.
DanceWize is an arm of Harm Reduction Victoria. It sets up chill out areas at music festivals and distributes information to promote safer drug use.
He says while people are going to use drugs, measures have to be in place to make it safer.
“I think as long as we are working within a prohibitionist system where these drugs are unregulated — and therefore we don’t know what’s in them — we need to work in minimising the risk.”
He is advocating discussion of the use of pill testing at festivals.
“People say if they could test their drugs and found out their drugs were not what they thought that they were, they would alter their drug-taking behaviour.”
In 1985, the Federal Government adopted a harm minimisation approach to drug policy in Australia. The approach has three arms — supply reduction, demand reduction and harm reduction.
Many believe existing policy is failing, but opinion on the best option is sharply divided.
Shane Varcoe, director of alcohol and drug educator the Dalgarno Institute, says Australia gave up its war on drugs.
He says 30 years of a harm reduction ideology has only increased drug use, with young people, in particular, risking their lives.
“There seems to be like an unwritten law that substances are going to be used at these festivals, drugs are going to be part of the experience,” Mr Varcoe says.
An automatic response after a tragedy like the death of Georgina was often to say “we need to make this safer so let’s legalise drugs”.
“Illicit drugs are banned because they are psychotropic toxins that have all sorts of impacts.
“Our concern is when these tragedies happen there are people who want to cash in on that to promote a pro-drug agenda.
“All the evidence is in — these drugs are dangerous, they are toxins.”
He says pro-drug activists are sending out a permissive message.
“Every time that permissive message goes out it buys another recruit. I say ‘why are we doing this to our young people’ — it breaks your heart.”
Mr Varcoe says the QUIT campaign has been hugely successful in reducing smoking.
“It’s worked with tobacco but apparently it can’t work with illicit drugs.”
The Dalgarno Insitute’s programs have found that peer pressure is one of the major drivers of illicit drug use.
A lack of resilience was behind this willingness of young people to succumb to peer pressure and “play Russian roulette with their lives”.
Mr Varcoe says prevention and education is the best option.
MS BUCCIANTI now urges young people at music festivals to get high on the music, remain vigilant, travel together, ensure someone remains sober, not to mix any drugs and be very, very careful.
“Before you take anything, take half-an-hour out — think of Georgina, think of Daniel, think of the pain you are going to create if anything happens to you.”
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