Overdose Hardmission Melbourne 2024: Confronting details emerge about music festival scene as eight partygoers fight for life

Seven partygoers had to be intubated after overdosing on illegal drugs at a music festival, with a total of eight people still fighting for their lives.

The mass overdoses at the Hardmission Festival at Melbourne's Flemington Racecourse took place over four hours on Saturday.

The victims, who are believed to have taken the party drug ecstasy, were rushed to hospitals including Royal Melbourne, St Vincent's, Footscray, Sunshine and The Austin.

Victorian Ambulance Union general secretary Danny Hill recalled the horror, saying eight were hospitalized while seven had to be intubated at the scene.

Intubation is used when a person cannot breathe on their own. A tube is placed in the mouth or nose and connected to a machine that pumps oxygen into the person's windpipe.

“These were patients who were seriously ill and required life-saving interventions so effective that they did not die,” Mr Hill told Sunrise on Monday morning.

“We had emergency physicians on site providing patient intubation, but they were overwhelmed and had to call in paramedics to assist with care that would normally be done in an energy department.”

Seven of the eight people rushed to hospital were put into an induced coma.

Mr Hill noted that the sweltering heat would also have had an impact, and stressed the importance of introducing pill testing.

“None of these drugs are safe, but at least people can detect if this is the very deadly variant that caused so much damage to at least eight people who required intensive care,” he said.

Paramedics from other parts of the city were called in at around 10.30pm to help with what Mr Hill called an 'emergency' situation.

“It is quite a high level of treatment that our paramedics perform and it is reserved for our most time-critical patients and patients with life-threatening health conditions,” he told the ABC.

“It's probably quite rare for this number of people to need such aggressive treatment.”

Friends of some of the people hospitalized have taken to social media to blame the heat rather than drug use.

'My mate is in intensive care, had to carry himself out and put him on the grass himself. Overheated, way too hot,” wrote a friend of a victim.

'He is still in an induced coma. Hopefully we'll see him wake up tomorrow.'

The person claimed that his partner had taken two 'capsules' of MDMA and nothing else.

“The conversation around pill testing is sure to flare up and the media will no doubt act as if the pills are unreliable,” said another.

Video footage from the festival posted on social media showed a person holding up a cell phone with the word “Caps?” written on the screen.

This is a word sometimes used by people who want to buy illegal drugs in capsules.

Mr Hill said people attending such events should inform themselves about the dangers of using illegal drugs such as ecstasy.

'I think this highlights the dangers of some of the drugs being distributed at rave parties and why there need to be mechanisms in place to try to protect against them. It raises the issue of pill testing and pill checking.”

He said drugs sold at raves are sometimes laced with other chemicals and can have very dangerous side effects.

Mr Hill said the drug people are given can 'often be very different to what they think they have bought'.

Volunteers from alcohol and drug harm reduction DanceWize were at the Hardmission Festival.

On Friday, organizers posted on social media that “Hardmission is committed to providing a safe and enjoyable experience for all our visitors.

'As part of our commitment to minimizing harm, we are proud to announce DanceWize's presence at the event.

'Your well-being is our priority. If you or anyone you know needs help or support during the event, DanceWize will be on site, ready to provide information, guidance and assistance with any harm reduction concerns.”

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Hardmission and DanceWize for comment.

Australia's spring/summer music festivals got off to a horror start in the first weekend of October, when 18 people at two events were rushed to hospital after drug overdoses.

This happened despite the introduction of amnesty bins and a large police presence with sniffer dogs.

The festival season kicked off with tens of thousands of revelers at Sydney Olympic Park's Knockout Outdoor and Sydney's Listen Out at Centennial Park.

That October weekend, more than seventy people were arrested for drug possession and another four for drug trafficking.

The arrests and hospitalizations come despite the fact that amnesty bins have been set up at both events where revelers can dispose of drugs without fear of arrest.

The policy was introduced as a recommendation as part of an investigation conducted in 2020 into the deaths of six young people at music festivals in NSW between December 2017 and January 2019.

Alex Ross-King, 19, Joshua Tam, 22, Callum Brosnan, 21, Diana Nguyen, 21, Joseph Pham, 23 all died at festivals after taking MDMA or ecstasy.

Five out of six festival goers also had other illegal substances in their system.

The inquest also recommended a number of other measures, including pill testing, scrapping the use of sniffer dogs and reducing the number of strip searches.

The government rejected all recommendations to use police sniffer dogs this weekend to discourage drug use.