If the Queensland government was confident in its decision to cut pill-testing services, why won’t it release the service evaluation report?
The RACGP, alongside researchers and addiction treatment services, has formally called on the Queensland government to produce the taxpayer-funded independent evaluation of pill-testing sites – a service the state has now axed.
A spokesman for Queensland’s Health and Ambulance Services Minister Tim Nicholls told The Medical Republic that the evaluation report would be considered in Cabinet, but did not confirm whether it would be released to the public.
“The government’s position is unchanged: drugs bought in the shadows at an event or through the mail should never be consumed in any circumstance,” the spokesman said.
“Testing samples sends the wrong message.”
Evidence does not support claims that the implementation and availability of drug-checking services leads to increased drug use.
RACGP Queensland chair Dr Cathryn Hester said the evaluation, which came at a cost of $453,000 to the taxpayer, should “see the light of day”.
“We have evidence from other jurisdictions around the world that drug testing is a sensible harm-reduction measure,” she said.
“If the government was confident its decision to close the drug-testing sites was based on the best available evidence, this evaluation would be made public.”
RMIT criminology and drug researcher Associate Professor Monica Barratt speculated that one of the reasons that the report was going unreleased was because it potentially demonstrates the utility of drug-checking services in harm reduction.
“If [the report] was going to say that, then it would be in keeping with the other evaluations that we’ve had in this country,” she told TMR.
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“We’ve had a published evaluation from the ACT that was positive – what that was able to demonstrate was that, when we have a drug-checking or pill-testing service operating, people come in, they submit their substances, find out what’s in them and that not only helps people to avoid the most dangerous substances, but it also allows us to alert the community at large as to what’s going on in our drugs markets.”
That information is not only useful for people who use illicit drugs, Professor Barratt pointed out, but also helps inform staff at emergency departments and alcohol and drug services on how best to treat people coming through the door.
“Queensland now has a lot less information about what’s in the drugs market,” she said.
“Obviously some drugs don’t obey borders, and [clinicians] will be able to get some information from other parts of Australia, but it’s not going to have that local impact that the services in Brisbane and the Gold Coast were able to [provide].
“I do hope we get to find out what was in the [evaluation] report, and that will, I imagine, add to the evidence base that we have here in Australia to support these services.”
Early last year, Queensland became the first jurisdiction after the ACT to fund a pill-testing service.
When the new Liberal National Party government entered office toward the end of 2024, it announced it would be scrapping the services.
The two permanent CheQpoint pill-testing sites in Brisbane and the Gold Coast shut their doors in April of this year after their government contract was not renewed.
Drug-checking service The Loop, which was one of the three organisations that partnered to run CheQpoint, plans to release a final report containing its own data in the coming weeks.
“We know that around one in four people that came through the service reduced the amount of drugs that they used after accessing our service,” The Loop CEO Cameron Francis told TMR.
“It varies month to month, but between 10% and 15% of people who came to the service disposed of their drugs after they spoke with someone.
“Generally, around about 40% of people who came through the service either reduced how much they took or [did] not use those drugs at all.
“I can’t think of another health intervention that can achieve outcomes like that.”
Mr Francis said that, by putting out an alert that nitazenes had been detected in counterfeit Oxycodone pills, CheQpoint had directly prevented at least one person from potentially overdosing.
“Because they saw our alert, they brought their tablet in for us to check, and it was the same thing – it was protonitazene,” he said.
“We know people have died from single tablets from that batch.”
