When Adriana Buccianti’s son Daniel died of a drug overdose at the Rainbow Serpent music festival in 2012, she wanted to blame someone.
“I was just so distressed that I guess I wanted someone hung and quartered,” she told Guardian Australia from her home in Victoria this week.
“I think that kind of knee-jerk reaction from grief makes you do all sort of stuff. I called initially for the festival to be closed. I think I said things like, ‘if the police didn’t find drugs on people, they weren’t looking hard enough’. I was in a terrible headspace.”
But in the seven years since her son died, Buccianti has managed to put her anger behind her.
She’s now an advocate for the introduction of pill testing, and has spoken at the opening of the Rainbow Serpent festival to caution festival-goers to take of themselves and each other.
She’s also the author of a petition on Change.org with more than 93,000 signatures calling for the New South Wales and Victorian premiers Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews to allow pill testing at music festivals.
She puts part of the change down to a conversation with a friend of her son’s, who asked whether she wanted to “destroy everything that he loved”.
“And I thought, no, I don’t want to do that,” she said.
“Then the year after Daniel died I got an automated call to purchase early-bird tickets for Rainbow, and I had to make this sliding-doors decision of what do I do here.
“I just said, ‘please don’t forget my son died on your grounds’, and it set off this chain of events.”
On Friday, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians joined the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners as well as the former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer in calling for pill testing to be allowed at festivals.
There have been five deaths from suspected drug overdoses at music festivals in NSW since the middle of September.
Central coast teenager Alex Ross-King, 19, became the latest victim after she was rushed from the FOMO festival at Parramatta park last Saturday.
Ross-King’s grandmother, Denise Doig, has also called for Berejiklian to allow pill-testing.
“Premier, please can we have this pill-testing done?” Doig told Channel Ten after Ross-King’s death. “It’s such a small thing to do. It’s not hard [and], if it saves one life, one life is a life.”
Saturday would have been Daniel Buccianti’s 41st birthday, and Adriana admits to feeling frustrated by the lack of action since his death. She said seeing the number of deaths still occurring at festivals sometimes acted as a trigger.
“Do you get re-traumatised again? Yeah, you do,” she said.
“There’s no two ways about it. You get re-traumatised in the sense that you know what those people are going to go through. There’s the autopsy, and the coroner, and the toxicology report. It’s brutal, it tells you everything, not just, ‘your son died of this’.
“And it all takes months to come back so you’re left just wondering ‘how could this have happened’?
“Then there’s the stigma of losing your child to an overdose. The comments you get whenever a story comes out. The horrific stuff people say to you, like ‘your son deserved this’, that ‘it was natural selection’.”
She said Berejiklian should “put herself in any of our positions, those of us who have lost children to something avoidable”.
Not every parent of a drug overdose victim feels the same, however. Tony Wood, the father of 15-year-old Anna Wood who died in 1995, has been a vocal opponent of pill testing, saying it would not make taking drugs safer.
“Pill testing is another lark thought up by the pro-legalisation lobby,” he told the Daily Telegraph in January.
“If it was going to save any parent from the heartache of losing a child, I would be all for it.
“I can’t think of any situation where it would work.”
Julie Davis, whose son Stefan Woodward died of an overdose at the Stereosonic festival in Adelaide in 2015, also told Guardian Australia she did not support pill testing.
“What happened to ‘say no to drugs’?” she asked.
She said festival organisers should be “accountable for deaths that occur” on their watch, and called for “more first aid tents so no one waits in line waiting to be helped … free water, more paramedics walking around [who] know the signs of dehydration [and] huge fines or jail time [for people caught] with drugs.”