Drug testing will be introduced in Victoria, with users able to test pills, powders and liquids for the presence of deadly substances at festivals and at a fixed location in Melbourne.
After making the announcement via Instagram Monday night, the premier, Jacinta Allan, on Tuesday confirmed that the service will become permanent in Victoria following an 18-month trial.
The move brings the state into line with the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland, where drug checking services have been in place since 2022 and 2024.
“I want to be really clear here – this doesn’t make drugs legal and it most certainly doesn’t make drugs safe,” Allan said on Tuesday.
“We’re doing this because all the evidence says it works. The evidence tells us it changes behaviour. It’s a simple, commonsense way to save lives.”
She said the trial would begin in summer, with a mobile service to attend up to 10 music festivals.
By mid-2025 a fixed site will also open in an inner Melbourne area close to nightlife and transport, which will be run by a community or tertiary health provider.
The government has ruled out locating the service in the community health hub it is preparing to open in the central business district, or at the medically supervised safe injecting room in North Richmond.
Both the mobile and fixed-site services will be able to test the makeup of most pills, capsules, powders, crystals and liquids to identify deadly substances, including synthetic drugs, which Allan said had caused 46 overdose deaths in 2022.
She said paramedics had attended more drug overdoses at festivals in the first three months of this year than during all of last year.
At one electronic music festival in Melbourne in January, nine people were hospitalised due to drug overdoses, eight of whom were placed in a coma. In March a young man died from a suspected overdose at a festival near Ararat, in the state’s south-west.
“So how do we confront this?” Allan said. “We can put our heads in the sand like politicians have done for decades. Or we can change behaviour. We can engage young people in honest, open, focused conversations to work to change behaviour.”
She noted a 2022 study that found 86% of drug users in Portugal and 69% in the UK didn’t take their drugs once test results indicated they were different than expected.
Victoria’s minister for mental health, Ingrid Stitt, said the trial would cost $4m. She said the government would introduce legislation to ensure no one operating or using the service was breaking the law.
By early 2026, Stitt said, it would decide on a permanent model and funding.
The announcement is a major shift from the government’s previous position under Daniel Andrews, who rejected several coronial recommendations for a drug-checking service.
Allan said she had only come around to the idea of pill testing as her two children grew older.
“If you’d asked me a number of years ago, this wasn’t something that I was particularly convinced on,” she said. “But, particularly as my kids have become that little bit older and since becoming premier, this is something that I have wanted to deliver.”
The move has been welcomed by the Alcohol and Drug Foundation, the Royal Australian College of GPs, the Penington Institute and the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association, as well as upper house crossbenchers from the Greens, Animal Justice and Legalise Cannabis parties, who introduced a joint bill to introduce a pill testing scheme last year. Their support will secure the legislation’s passage through parliament.
But the opposition leader, John Pesutto, has vowed to repeal the service if elected in 2026, claiming it will encourage drug use.
“This gives a green light to the taking the pills and it also, unfortunately, lays out a welcome mat for those who will deal in pills and other drugs, who will see this as an invitation to only expand their activities at music festivals and other gatherings of young people,” he said.
