KEY POINTS:
A cocktail of party pills and alcohol during New Year's Eve celebrations at Mt Maunganui made at least 10 revellers so sick they needed medical help, and two others had seizures the next day.
Mt Maunganui St John staff treated a record number of patients for symptoms including vomiting and a lowered level of consciousness as a result of combining alcohol and party pills.
Last year only two or three people were treated for similar problems but this year two people, one a 15-year-old girl, were in such a poor state that they had to be taken to hospital.
On New Year's Day four people were treated for seizures and convulsions, two of whom - an 18-year-old woman and 28-year-old man - said they had taken a combination of party pills and alcohol.
National Party police spokesman Chester Borrows, who watched the police working at the Mount on New Year's Eve, said he believed young people had taken more pills than usual because they knew they would soon be banned.
A law banning party pills containing the chemical BZP was to have come in before Christmas but was delayed because Parliament ran out of time. The second reading of the bill could now be as far away as late this month.
Mount St John team manager Gary Bishell said it was possible the seizures were the result of severe hangovers, including extreme dehydration that was caused by combining alcohol and party pills.
"It's a lethal combination between the two of them - you combine them with alcohol and they're knocking people over," Mr Bishell said.
He said most of the grossly intoxicated patients who admitted having taken party pills on the night were females aged 15 to 17.
Young people saw the pills as herbal and therefore took larger doses and combined them with alcohol, Mr Bishell said. There were 36 callouts between 6pm on New Year's Eve and 7am the next day.
Mr Bishell said there were 10 jobs until 6pm "and then it kicked off from there".
Two ambulances and a first-response car from Tauranga and three ambulances from the Mount attended 70 callouts compared with about 50 last year.
St John district operations manager Jeremy Gooders said the workload across Tauranga and the Mount at New Year's Eve grew every year.
Although staff had coped well with Tauranga's continued growth, staff levels would be reconsidered.
Staff attended fewer serious calls this year compared with the serious assaults and hit-and-run accidents of previous years, Mr Gooders said.
Last year callouts peaked at 11pm, but this year's workload was steadier with all ambulances working constantly from 6pm until about 3am.
"This year it was all go from early in the evening," he said.
- Bay of Plenty Times
