Cover Story
Coming to the party
by Matt Nippert
Will criminalising party pills only push people into harder drugs like P?
That Friday morning Kat Trevissick knew she was going to have a busy day. A line of people stretched around the block from her central Auckland store, and the queue lasted until early afternoon. It was, she says, “super busy, way busier than New Year’s Eve, probably three times busier”.
The crowds on January 19 were all off to the Big Day Out music festival, and they were uniformly after one thing from Trevissick’s Cosmic Corner: party pills.
Despite the morning crush, police say there were fewer incidents of disorder at the 2007 Big Day Out than in previous years. And Adam Johnston, St John operations manager at the event, says there were no serious medical problems as a result of concertgoers’ party-pill consumption. “They cause us fewer problems than alcohol: people aren’t as aggro.”
Benzylpiperazine (BZP), the active ingredient in party pills, mimics the effects of amphetamines, leading to calls for the substance to be treated like other illegal drugs and banned. Party-pill proponents argue that moves to criminalise this compound will push users to more harmful illicit drugs – like P – and the $26m BZP market will be made more dangerous by being driven underground.
The decider in this debate is Jim Anderton, the Associate Minister for Health with responsibility for drug policy. He says that in 2004, when the use of party pills was brought to his attention, his “knee-jerk reaction” was to impose a ban.
“I’m a conservative on these things: I don’t smoke and I don’t drink much, either. I’m as likely to take BZP as end up on Mars next week with an international science expedition.”
But when he asked for research into what effect this novel compound has on humans (BZP was originally synthesised as a cattle dewormer in 1944), he was told by staff that there was none. Any decision for or against would thus have been ill-informed. Anderton set in train four research projects to provide some answers. In the meantime, sales of BZP products were restricted to those aged 18 or older and advertising was severely restricted.
The results of these studies have started trickling back, with mixed conclusions. Two out of three studies – one of which had to be halted because participants were suffering ill-effects – found that BZP resulted in some adverse reactions, principally insomnia and a loss of appetite, but also the potential for life-threatening seizures. One of the studies also found that the substance increased concentration and driving ability.
Whether party pills were a substitute or a gateway for harder drug use was also considered in a study of 2010 people, aged 13 to 45, by Massey University last year. The use of party pills is widespread (one in five of those surveyed has tried them), and 45.2 percent of users said they took BZP so they didn’t need to use illicit drugs. A ban, therefore, could push many into the arms of illegal drug dealers.
And, as Johnston says, “The problem is, if you suddenly ban something like this, a portion of users will go back to drugs like Fantasy and Ecstasy, which do cause us problems.”
Cosmic Corner spokesperson Tyreena Cook also says that an outright ban would be counterproductive. “History has taught us that prohibition doesn’t work. It would just go underground, and the dodgy people in the industry would get worse.”
Meanwhile, Anderton, who will make a recommendation to Cabinet in May, says it’s not his concern how users and the market would react to criminalisation. “It’s not relevant. It’s a question of the inherent danger they pose to people buying them, that’s the issue.”
By this measure of “danger”, Anderton says that if he was assessing the safety of our two leading national vices – alcohol and tobacco (contributing to 90 percent of criminal offences and 4700 deaths a year, respectively) – he’d have no hesitation in putting them on the banned list alongside cannabis, cocaine and P.
“And if Queen Elizabeth I had known that millions of her future citizens could be killed by tobacco, she probably wouldn’t have knighted Sir Walter Raleigh. It’s all very well to have hindsight, but it’s very hard to close the gate after it’s been opened wide.”
