Politics

Please Enjoy Steve Price Getting Owned In A Pill Testing Debate On ‘The Project’

"Yeah, but we have laws".

steve price the project

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The Project’s resident cranky conservative dinosaur Steve Price has done it again, and by ‘done it’ we mean pissed people off with his staunch commitment to tired and outdated garbage.

Last night on the show, he decided to trash pill testing at festivals, despite early evidence suggesting that it may have saved lives at Groovin The Moo.

Price’s nonsense began after harm reduction expert Matt Noffs outlined the benefits of pill testing at music festivals, and the success of the Groovin The Moo trial. Despite clearly knowing very little about the subject, Price butted in to snap that he’d “hardly call police ignoring drug use enlightened”. He followed up by insisting that “we have laws, man”, and things went downhill from there.

At one point, Noffs tried to make Price feel some empathy by pointing out that actually, he takes drugs too.

“You do take drugs, Steve,” he said. “You might enjoy a beer, but that’s sold over the counter, and you’ve got some sort of quality control around it. This is a market that we know nothing about. And again, if you or I could just have our kids not use drugs, we’d do that, but it hasn’t worked, Steve. It hasn’t worked for a hundred bloody years.”

“Well it’s worked for me,” Price snapped.

“I think that the truth you and I know is that you might have tried drugs when you were younger,” Noffs responded, and Price became visibly enraged.

“No, it’s worked with my children! They don’t take drugs!” he snapped. And sure, maybe they don’t, though personally if I was Steve Price’s child I would not feel particularly encouraged to tell him I was taking drugs.

“You’ve tried drugs before, come on!” Noffs said again.

“Me?!? No!!” was Price’s response, and everyone laughed at him.

The segment ended with Price turning to his fellow panellists for backup, and getting thrown under the bus when the rest of The Project team said they thought pill testing sounded like a pretty sensible idea, actually. It seems like the show’s audience agreed, too, and they’ve taken to social media to let Price know that opposing a policy with the potential to save lives is actually real shitty.

You can watch the show for yourself here — the pill testing bickering starts around 25 minutes in.