NSW makes festival drug checking permanent with $4.3m funding

Fifteen festivals a year will get on-site testing from October after a trial cut ICU admissions and reached 1,800 people who'd never touched harm reduction before.

Told by Jake Donovan · 3 September 2026

NSW just made drug checking at festivals permanent, which means the thing advocates have been screaming about for years while watching kids die is now funded policy. The Minns Government committed $4.3 million to continue the service at up to fifteen music festivals a year from October, following a twelve-month trial that cut ICU admissions and reached people who had never touched a harm reduction service in their lives.

The numbers: 1,800 people used it. 1,500 samples tested. Most of them—majority, not a handful—had never engaged with health or harm reduction services before. That is the mechanism. You are not converting the already-converted. You are catching people in the hour before they dose, when they are still deciding, and connecting them with someone who knows what they are looking at.

The University of Sydney evaluation found the service was associated with a reduction in urgent drug-related hospital presentations and ICU admissions compared with previous years at the same festivals. That is not a maybe. That is fewer people in emergency departments and fewer people in intensive care because they knew what they were about to take.

Here is how it works. You bring a sample. NSW Health Pathology chemists test it on-site for purity, potency and adulterants. Then a peer worker from NUAA—formerly the NSW Users and AIDS Association—explains what is in it and what that means for your body. You decide. Amnesty bins are there if you want to bin it. No one is arrested. No one is named. The service is free and anonymous.

Festivals will be chosen based on size, type and location—characteristics associated with higher probability of drug harm. NSW Health will consult with the festival industry and harm reduction organisations to pick the fifteen.

Health Minister Ryan Park said it clearly: no level of illicit drug use is safe, this is not a silver bullet, and this announcement is not an endorsement. Illicit drugs remain illegal in NSW. What drug checking does is reduce harm. It helps people make safer choices. It keeps people alive.

Youth Minister Rose Jackson called it a critical pathway for young people to connect with trained health workers and receive trusted advice. Jo Haylen, Member for Summer Hill, said just saying 'don't take drugs' alone does not keep people safe, and the trial proves that connecting people with health professionals changes behaviour.

Jennie Ross-King, whose daughter Alex died at a festival, said the enormity of reaching this point is not lost on her. Seven years of grief and advocacy. Seven years of telling Alex's story. Young people take risks, she said. They do not deserve to die because of one decision. This will go a long way towards giving them the information they need to make safer choices and come home safely.

The Coalition refused to consider this for years. They ignored clinicians, advocates and health experts. The Minns Government listened to lived experience and turned it into funded policy.

Fifteen festivals a year. October start. The bins stay.