Around the year 2000 Nick Wallis was sat at a card table at the back of an abandoned docklands shed in Melbourne surrounded by lasers, strobe lighting and loud, thumping bass music. As he sat there, strangers in kaleidoscopic outfits with neon wristbands would walk up to the table and hand him a bag of pills.Article continues after advertisement
With the beat reverberating off the walls, Nick would pull out one of the tiny pills, hold it steady between his fingers and scrape some dust off it into a shallow dish. Then he would drip some clear reagent liquid on to it. In an instant there was a bloom of colour. If the mixture turned deep violet, almost black, then the powder contained MDMA, the chemical name for the party drug ecstasy. If it flared orange or green, or perhaps even failed to change colour at all, then Nick had to warn whoever had given him the pills that they had actually bought something else entirely and the drugs they were about to take could seriously harm them.
“This was a non-funded, back-of-the-dance-floor project,” he explained when we met in Melbourne a couple of decades later. “We would approach parties with an offer to do sort of brief intervention education work, operating our care space at their events.”
