“No one should be told to go home and slapped with a six-month ban just because they go out to see live music and a drug dog looked at them.”

So said the Facebook page of the campaign group Sniff Off, which has been fighting police attempts to ban people from festivals, even if they have no drugs on them, if a sniffer dog “identifies” them.

On 5 June, NSW Police announced that any revellers stopped by sniffer dogs at the weekend’s Above and Beyond festival would be refused entry to the event, regardless of whether they were actually found to have illegal substances. 

Figures from previous years show that sniffer dogs detect falsely up to 80 percent of the time.

According to Sniff Off, police “backed down from their initial plan to ban anyone searched at Above and Beyond, [but] people still had their nights ruined, people were still humiliated and strip searched for no reason, and people were still kicked out after no drugs were found on them”.

Policing people’s private lives, especially using drug laws, has been a favourite method for the state to demonise poor people and push for cuts to welfare and public housing. 

It has also been used to target Indigenous communities, and accounts for a significant portion of Indigenous incarceration. Government statistics collected by the NSW Greens in 2013 indicate that sniffer dogs were deployed at Redfern train station at a comparatively high rate. Redfern police are notorious for their treatment of Indigenous people. 

Aggressive drug policies are not about safety. Even if they were, they have proven to be a total failure at preventing drug-related injuries. 

Conversely, pill testing at Canberra’s Groovin the Moo festival in April successfully detected deadly substances in two samples, giving festivalgoers the opportunity to discard contaminated pills under an amnesty. Longer term pill testing programs overseas have succeeded in reducing overdoses and other drug-related injuries.