The reports from the big dance party at Mount Smart in Auckland on Friday make gruesome reading.

Under an imported tent, 20 thousand youngsters gathered to dance to the music of international acts like Flume and Diplo. Dance they did but they also chug-a-lugged a mountain of pills and got off their heads.

Five people hospitalised and three critical after overdoses. Tales of kids chewing their lips off. 18-year-old boys in seizures.  Experienced festival goers said the event was the most off its face and wild thing they had ever seen.

Then there was crazy drug-fuelled risk taking behaviour too.  One idiot scaled the internal scaffolding to 20 metres above a heavy tripping crowd. Others climbed up the outside guy ropes and gambolled all over the roof. Just flirting with falling and paralysing themselves

There’s much to unpack here.

Firstly, who didn’t safeguard the tent? This isn’t new. There used to be the Supertop at Mount Smart.  There the supports and the guy ropes were all fool proofed against the dicks who go to concerts jacked up on drugs and misspent energy. This is a huge fail by Regional Facilities Auckland’s safety officers.

Then there’s the drugs. 90 per cent of the security was assigned to the doors to stop stuff getting in. Well that failed. Strange that. A pill or 2 or a bag or two are very easy to hide. In your shoe. In your jeans change pocket. In your underwear. They don’t smell so dogs are useless. Meanwhile the sheer volume of kids speeding meant that the level of violence was through the tent’s roof but there was barely anyone

Yes the kids. This is more proof that the drugs war has failed. And these drugs are caustic. This is not a joint. These are chemicals designed to change the brain’s chemistry to induce a different reality and the side effects are brutal. And it’s more rampant now that ever, the dance party tent was littered with the evidence of little plastic bags. And the chemists making this crap are getting worse at making the stuff and even more concerning is the fact that they just don’t care if people die. And we knew that from the synthetic cannabis  debacle where nearly 80 people have died in just 2 years.

Now I’m not some fogey tut-tutting. I lived in London in the 90s and I went to raves in the countryside and I saw the blue haze of psychotically affected kids dancing. And I was there for the second Summer of Love. But this is next level. This is rat poison, brain frying on an industrial scale egged on by extreme profit making and the kids are swallowing it hook line and sinker.

And finally the idea of drug testing at festivals has once again been raised and the fogeys have had their say. Both Simon Bridges and Winston Peters are dead against it because how can you test an illegal substance and then give it back and not break the law. Well just don’t return the sample. I know this might mean less people would use the testers but surely it’s important to show the kids that what they’re buying are hot happy pills. Increasingly they’re poison not for humans. This is real education.  Winston and Simon seem to think that kids dying is a good way to send the message that the pill industry is poisonous and I just can’t abide that.

• Three critical after taking substance at Auckland dance event