Young men are the most likely to die after using drugs at music festivals.
Young women may just be too sensible to overdose, according to one of the country's leading experts who is a Canberra doctor and academic.
David Caldicott is one of the authors of a groundbreaking study of the 64 music-festival deaths in Australia since 2000 where the cause has been determined in a thorough coronial inquiry.
Of the 64, three-quarters were male, mostly men in their mid-20s.
Each of the deaths has often involved a mixture of drugs, including alcohol. The most common drug involved was MDMA, better known as ecstasy.
Dr Caldicott of the ANU and North Canberra Hospital said the deaths were preventable tragedies.
"We have failed 64 people," he said.
He pointed to the waste of their lost lives.
"They might have ended up being captains of industry. These are young people who have unnecessarily died, and that's a tragedy."
The deaths were preventable because a message about risk clearly hadn't got to them. One task, he felt, was to work out the right messaging to get to this age group.
Taking drugs to excess might, for example, be a kind of civil disobedience, a kind of deliberate flouting of rules imposed by society.
Dr Caldicott thought that most of the dead were men because "young men have always been risk takers".
Many of the dead had consumed a mixture of drugs, including alcohol. They may not have understood the effects of such a cocktail. Alcohol may have emboldened people to go beyond the limit and take dangerously large amounts of a drug.
Two thirds of the 64 festival deaths involved ecstasy. Alcohol and cannabis were the next two drugs detected in the blood-streams of the deceased.
This study is the first to report on drug-related deaths at Australian music festivals. The authors think that the number of non-fatal overdoses at festivals was much higher.
Dr Caldicott is heavily involved in pill-testing in Canberra. His co-author Jennifer Schumann also believes that giving festival-goers and revelers somewhere to test the quality of drugs they may consumer later in the day is very worthwhile.
"The dose of MDMA and other illicit drugs in pills, powders and capsules, can vary considerably, exposing users to higher doses for sustained periods of time.
"Pill testing can help combat this - it gives festivalgoers more information about the contents of their drugs before they use them, and has already proved successful during trials in Australia.
""Health messaging at these events should also continue to highlight the importance of seeking early medical treatment if someone starts feeling unwell."
Earlier in the year, the ACT government said it wanted to restart pill-testing at festivals so that drug users could test the contents of their narcotics before consumption.
A permanent testing site has been running in the centre of the city on Thursdays and Fridays.
Festivals in Canberra tried out pill-testing in 2018 and 2019. ANU researchers then evaluated the trials and concluded "that the service impacted positively on patron knowledge, attitudes and behaviours".
"We never tell anyone that their drug is safe," Dr Caldicott, the doctor leading the permanent testing site, said.
