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  • AADD Moderators: swilow | Vagabond696

CONFERENCE: Club Health 2005 - Sydney

^ The inaugural Club Health conference was held in Melbourne last year, so I presume there's the intent to vary the location each year.

johnboy - I'm unable to attend the conference during the days due to work committments, but it'd be great to come to the social program and catch up with you all. Am I allowed to join you on Thursday night?
 
aunty establishment said:
^ The inaugural Club Health conference was held in Melbourne last year, so I presume there's the intent to vary the location each year.
That was the International Club Health conference, whereas this is the inaugeral national conference.
 
aunty - but of course. just call Buck's mobile (the number is in the program) to find out where we are.
 
Cowboy Mac said:
That was the International Club Health conference, whereas this is the inaugeral national conference.
My mistake! So, this will be an annual event? And where will it be held?

johnboy: thanks! Looking forward to catching up.
 
Just listening to hack on jjj then. Major props to John Boy ! 50k for a ion scanner wow! awesome indeed. I imagine we'll hear more of this in this thread.
 
That is indeed a big scoop for the Hack team there isn't it. Releasing details of enlightens fancy new ion scanner which will allow them to give accurate results on contents of pills without coming into contact with them. Was that information suppose to be leaked before you guys revealed it tomorrow?

Great stuff JB and the enlighten team, can't wait to hear how the whole conference goes for you all. Hopefully you guys get pillreports released in time to show it off.

Good stuff :)
 
If I get a chance I'll do a report later today. Very tired. So much happened, and most of it very good.
 
Apparently channel 9 news only played the story in Sydney (or decided not to play it?). Enlighten has the funds to purchase an Ion Scanner, using the same technology that customs uses at airports. The model we will be using over summer will be the Sabre 4000 which is a handheld compact model weighing only a few kilograms:

Saber-4000.jpg


This opens up a world of opportunity when combining results with a wireless internet connection and uploading them instantly to pillreports. For example we can now provide local hospitals and on site medicos with very accurate information on what is contained within the pills someone might have had, without waiting for a toxicology report. This will put Enlighten as a world leader in the field, and probably the only ones using Ion Scanning technology in the world in this way.

We can increase the database of known substances, so we will have the most common adulterants and be able to detect them. We've been working hard in stealth mode since the start of the year to get this off the ground, and it is fantasic to see that it has all happened. Expect to hear more about this later this summer.
 
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holy crap! that's awesome guys!!! Enlighten, the forefront of Harm Reduction!!!

keep up the good work. One day when I have money I just may donate some extra cash ;)
 
The mortgage repayments start next month, every Bluelighter is expected to put in $50 a month towards the repayments. Thanks ;)

Great news guys.
 
WOW! that's truly awesome. You guys are inspiring. Keep ut the great work.
 
Here is my talk. I adlibbed a fair bit as well but this gives you a good idea. I am going to get Mac and David to put their talks up as well.

--------------

Hello my name is John Davidson and I am the spokesperson for, and along with Mac, am one of the founding members of, Enlighten.

I'd like to begin by thanking Paul Dillon for inviting us to speak at this conference, as well as the international one last year. Paul, and NDARC, have been tireless in their effort to bring together all the stakeholders in this field.

The divide between those that do the drugs and those who profess to work for them, has been growing under this current government, and although there are a few brave individuals and organisations that have been working to fix this, there is still a great deal of work to do. This, I believe, is the theme of this last session.

SLIDE

Enlighten is an all volunteer pill testing, harm reduction and peer education group based in Melbourne, and we have been testing at events in Victoria for almost 5 years now, and in South Australia for the last three. Pill testing is arguably one of the most effective harm reduction tools available in the area of club drugs. Not just for the immediate information that can be supplied to drug users, giving them the opportunity to make informed decisions, but it is also one of the few ways of having users come to us, rather than simply throwing messages out into the media.

Enlighten exists because of a demand, a demand for information and advice. That demand exists. But the opportunity to supply this demand is being missed by the mainstream drug services.

I am not going to be making the case for pill testing here today, mostly because I have a lot to cover but also because there seems little point. SLIDE

At the last Club Health conference in Melbourne I spoke about this, but more importantly we heard from experts such as Dirk Korf, Jaap Jamin and Manuela Shmundt who all presented papers based on their research with various European pill testing groups over the last ten years. I urge anyone who is interested to download them from the Club Health website, particularly Dirk Korf's paper in which he presented his findings that pill testing can actually have a substantial demand reduction effect.

A couple of months after being presented with this compelling evidence, the Victorian Health department issued its recommendation that pill testing should not be considered, and went as far as to call for the banning of reagent kits. The only paper referenced was Dr Adam Winstock's from 2000, possibly because the findings of that paper, which was based on the responses of people who had not been exposed to pill testing and were only answering hypothetical questions, aligned with their prejudices.

In May of this year the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy issued their joint communiqué stating “that they could not endorse the development or use of drug testing kits for personal use in the light of the lack of evidence that they will lead to any net reduction in the harm caused by drugs.”

They based this finding on a report from a Special Working Group. I have no idea what was in this report. I certainly wasn’t asked to make a submission to it. And when I asked the council for a copy of this report I was told, SLIDE “all MCDS agendas, papers, reports and resolutions are confidential to persons and organizations represented at MCDS meetings. Discussion at MCDS meetings is also confidential and is not recorded electronically or in writing.”

Decisions are made behind closed doors, from secret evidence and no records are kept. What a sad state of affairs.

But around that time we heard that there has been some cause for optimism. We heard through the grapevine that a certain state health department, I won’t say which one, was about to spend some money on the issue of pill testing. The figure mentioned was SLIDE $50,000. Now to us that was an incredible sum. In Enlighten's existence we would not have spent a tenth of that amount. Real harm reduction is a very cost effective venture.

Our excitement quickly disappeared when we found out how the government intended to spend this money.

A poster. This isn't it really. It's a mock-up, because to the best of my knowledge the real poster hasn't seen the light of day. It may be sitting in a Minister's in tray, waiting their signature, or the whole project may have been scrapped. But this is the message the poster was designed to impress upon the public.

SLIDE “Don't use pill testing kits because they are not 100% accurate”

SLIDE Translation? Just say no to drugs. The government's total investment in the issue of pill testing is $50,000 on a poster that is actually a demand reduction effort. This is not harm reduction. Let's make that clear.

SLIDE We know reagent-testing kits are not 100% accurate. We have always been the first to say it. But what we have also said is that there are now alternatives to reagent testing that are, in fact, 100% accurate. The only thing that has held us back from acquiring this technology has been the cost.

Only a couple of years ago, when we began investigating this technology, we estimated that we would need up to $100,000 to purchase a portable testing solution. But the technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and the costs are dropping just as quickly. We asked ourselves; if all the government can think to do with $50,000 is make a poster saying that there is a problem (test kits are inaccurate), could we solve that problem?

So we raised that money, and a lot quicker than even I thought possible. Keep in mind that because Enlighten's central activity is illegal we cannot apply for any conventional funding, nor can we apply for the tax-exempt status, which would make getting donations a lot easier.

But, regardless, the donations flooded in. So where did it come from? The user base of ecstasy in Australia is massive. SLIDE The Australian Crime Commission's 2003-2004 report states that “more than a quarter of all men aged 20-29 had used it, including 15 per cent in the past year.” This is a very large, and an increasingly neglected part of society. And the more the government ignores them, or if they’re lucky, patronises them, the more pissed off and militant they become.

About the time we began fund raising the government rolled out yet another alarmist advertising campaign. It has to be asked: how many million dollars have been spent on these ads over the last 10 years? And have they had any effect? SLIDE “In 1995, just 1.1 per cent of all males surveyed had used ecstasy in the previous year. That number had quadrupled to 4.4 per cent last year.? (ACC)

And yet we continue to fund these demand reduction ads and give relatively nothing to harm reduction efforts. I'm not even going to touch on the 100's of millions spent on supply reduction, with little effect on the supply. In light of this is wasn't too hard to make the pitch that for a comparatively small amount of money we could actually achieve something; real harm reduction. Again there is a demand. And if we are to believe the prophets of the new economy, markets will always rise to meet such demands, and there is no need for governments to interfere. Our government, however, probably won't see it that way.

Over the last six months we have been researching the various options open to us.


The bench mark for laboratory testing of ecstasy has always been the GC/MS:

SLIDE SLIDE SLIDE

(ad lib about Sabre 4000. I'll put up some detail on it later.)

Accuracy is now achievable. Immediate and accurate results will be available to users, to help them make decisions about their use. And, most importantly, that information will be in a form that can be shared and help inform the decisions of many others.

SLIDE One of the main reasons we have been attracted to the Smith's devices has been the ability to export the data to a laptop. We began planning this project with the concept of immediate uploading of results to the internet. Mac will be going into more technical detail about our online strategies and technology but I need to emphasise how important is the timely sharing of this information.

One of the plans the government talks about is the idea of sharing the pill testing data gathered by police forensics labs with the emergency departments of hospitals. To the best of my knowledge this plan is still only that, a plan, and has not yet been put into place anywhere. This seems, on the face of it, a good idea. However it completely misses what I was taught was the point public health: Prevention is better than cure.

Shouldn't we be making sure that people aren't being admitted to hospitals because of adulterated pill? Why are we only responding to the problem once it has already happened?

But let's put that aside for the moment. That's a whole 'nother talk.

Suppose that we can only use pill testing data after the fact. What data are we using? The police data is, by its very nature, not indicative of what is available on the street. This data comes from seizures, big and small. They only test pills which have didn't make it to the dealer. But even supposing they do get an accurate cross sample, they have such a back log of testing to be done that six to nine months could go by before a potentially dangerous pill is noticed.

Surely testing pills at major events, where people are eager to hand them in, makes more sense? We can have the results up online within six to nine minutes. And we are going to. This summer we will be uploading the data we collect at major events to our website, making it instantly available to hospitals and medical professionals working in the area of those events.

SLIDE

The debate had changed. Every last one of the talking points that our opposition has used dismiss pilltesting are now irrelevant. Except the one they won't discuss. But I will get to that.

Talking Point One: “Pil testing will encourage drug use”

As we have seen, both at this conference and the last one, there is a great deal of evidence that this is false. Dirk Krof's paper shows how those who pill test use on average less than those who don't. And of those who do not take ecstasy, those who are exposed to pill testing are far less likely to start.

Talking Point Two: “Pilltesting is not accurate”.

Now it is.

Talking Point Three: “Pill testing is illegal”.

With the Ionscanner, as it is so sensitive, we can test pills without ever having to touch them, or even see them. To test we need to have the pills owner touch the pill very lightly with a wooden applicator or toothpick and then touch that against a paper swab. This does not have to happen in our presence. And once the swab is handed to us the active material may only be a billionth of a gram. We cannot be prosecutred for such microscopic amounts.

And that also covers Talking Point Four: “You hand the pill back!”. Nope. May not even see it. Ideally we would prefer not to have to go to this level of hands off, as although we could also automate the process of scanning images and recording size, it would be a lot easier if we could directly assist the people having their pills tested.

If the government is willing to allow a trial under those conditions then we are willing to compromise.

But what we are not willing to do is let the government get away with either ducking this debate entirely, or falling back on these now irrelevant talking points. We will just have to see if they are willing to have this issue aired again, because it will take a lot more bravery than I believe they have for them to discuss their only remaining objection; the moral one.

That is all they have left. And are the really going to see if they wil honestly state their policy, that drug users are bad people, sinners, and that to help them is fundamentally wrong.

Anyway, while they are working that one out, we'll be testing. Thank you.
 
heya guys back in canb now and seems that every thing from the last few days is sinking in,

i am very impressed how the last day went especially with the unvailing of the ion scanner in your talk jb followed by macs presentation on pillreports and how the Sabre will allow medical services more real time information than they have been able to attain before........

big props to enlighten indeed.........

stealing a line from another that was at the conference " after hearing dr caldicott's closing presentation i felt like making up a placard and marching" with the way the conference ended i think there is no way that the government will be able to sit on its hands any more ........

it'll be forced to act mainly due to the last three presentations of the day..


good work guys :)
 
ps it was good to catch up with those i know and to meet new ppl like cowboy mac,buck, danny from ravesafe vic, dr caldicott ( this man is tops) and the guys from adelaide and fiinally to the guys from new zealand who made friday night at home interesting indeed ;) :)
 
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^^^ Great speach. Bravo and kudo's to you all. What you're doing takes A LOT of guts. I look forward to reading the other two pieces.
Are you able to provide speaches from the other side of the fence at all?
 
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