For those of us who strenuously opposed pill testing in the past, it is a hard pill to swallow now that the Health Minister Ryan Park has surrendered to the reformers. (“Premier’s giant pill test”, DT, 19/12). Our war against drugs must address supply and demand. Ultimate addiction ignites demand and starts when experimenting with soft drugs. While this new study has been triggered by “diverse opinions”, its design must be objective, academically rigorous and results ought to be strictly evidence based. We deserve to be told what is actually being measured, whether there will be sequential analysis of those results and under what conditions the study will be abandoned. Will hot weather be seen as a confounding variable in the study, since hyperthermia complicates outcomes and how this will be treated in the data? Also, effective policing will confound the results, reducing the number of pills to test, but giving the false appearance that pill testing alone is reducing deaths. How will this data be managed? Without stating study questions beforehand, those with political opinions can readily treat the data as observational and use it to answer questions never asked nor optimised in the study design. No health minister should preside over a snake-oil study and keep his job. Alan Sexton, North Parramatta 20Dec2024