09/22/2025
The Queensland LNP Government is deliberately shutting down services that save Queenslander lives.
This is abhorrent. Defying medical experts and sacrificing people’s lives is NOT acceptable behaviour from a state government!
I need to tell you about what the LNP Government just did.
They waited until the final hour of the Parliamentary sitting week to table last-minute amendments that ban drug checking, AKA pill testing, in Queensland (both at festivals and at fixed sites operated by alcohol & other drug services).
They snuck them into a totally unrelated bill, with no time for scrutiny or proper debate.
It's sneaky, cynical and undemocratic - but trashing parliamentary processes isn’t the worst part.
These amendments will cost lives.
During the first year of drug checking clinics operating in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, they found hundreds of unexpected substances in people’s drugs. That included dangerous "street benzos" that can cause multi-day blackouts, as well as potentially deadly substances like cathinone and nitazenes.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people (14%) chose to discard their drugs or reduce their dose (21%).
Conservative politicians say they want to reduce drug use, but when we have a service that actually did that, they've banned it.
This also means services can no longer issue life-saving notices about dangerous substances circulating in the community. It can take weeks for Queensland Health to issue those warnings, whereas drug checking service Cheqpoint was doing it in real time.
This decision is cruel, baseless and contradictory to the evidence of medical experts including the AMA. I will not stop fighting to reverse it.
In the meantime, with dangerous synthetic opioids causing accidental overdose in the community, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you get some naloxone (AKA Narcan) from your local chemist. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it reverses opioid overdose.
The LNP clearly doesn't care about lives lost to overdose, so for now it's up to us.