Much to mum's relief, our dabbling wasn't a gateway to addiction and it didn't destroy our lives.

My sister is now a teacher at a prestigious school and I'm ticking along okay doing this.

We grew up in a stable family in a regional town and our parents instilled in us the importance of obeying the law. They were not 'hippies' and they don't do drugs themselves. They set up strict boundaries to control our behaviour and they punished us when we stepped outside those rules.

Despite our wholesome upbringing, in our teens and early twenties we experimented with the same drugs that killed six kids at music festivals in NSW from December 2017 to January 2019.

If the statistics are to be believed, the chances are your children will too.

The difference is, we took ecstasy and MDMA 10 years ago with little concern of being strip searched at a festival gate and potentially destroying our prospects for the careers which now make that lifestyle unappealing.

Sure the police attended festivals and there were arrests, but it was the dealers and the dickheads who were getting handcuffed. Those of us who were just spending a few summers seeing who could outlast who on the dancefloor went home to avoid calls from our parents for a few days.

Today, kids are being threatened with criminal charges before they've had a chance to consider there's more to life than pills and parties.

Our 'War On Drugs' has seen sniffer dogs stationed at festival gates to help arrest children. Most of whom pose as little risk to society as the pills in their purses if only they were provided the opportunity to test them.

The result is teenagers are taking unnecessary risks. They're not taking drugs less. They're taking drugs quicker, 'double dropping' at festival gates to avoid getting caught with them in their handbags.

This week, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said she would ignore recommendations by the Deputy Coroner Harriet Grahame to introduce pill testing at festivals. When the draft report is released ahead of festival season, the Premier will ignore the advice of parents who had teenagers overdose last summer.

"There is no such thing as a safe illegal drug," Ms Berejiklian said in response to the recommendation from Ms Grahame, which also included scrapping the use of sniffer dogs and decriminalising the personal use of illicit drugs.

While I would argue that there is such thing as safe illegal drugs, that's not really the point.

The point is we were taking drugs 10 years ago no matter how much our mums hated it and someone else's kids will be taking drugs 10 years from now no matter how much they hate it.

By pretending more police is the answer, by refusing to mitigate the risk through pill testing, the NSW government is not just turning kids into criminals, it is putting lives at risk.

Would a more serious threat of arrest have stopped my friends and I from breaking the law? Not a chance.

I'd have done exactly what today's bold, young, things are doing. I'd have taken all my drugs before I got to the gate.

Is that a smart solution? No way. Would I do that now? Not a chance.

But there's an easy way to stop children having to make that decision. Ditch the sniffer dogs, make drugs safer.

The Coroner has spoken, the parents have spoken and summer is on its way.

Alex Crowe is an Australian Community Media journalist. The opinions expressed in this piece are hers alone.