THE war on drugs has become an arms race. In an effort to outpace the law, unregulated laboratories are creating thousands of modified versions of psychedelic substances and selling them to unknowing partygoers.
These chemistry experiments have consequences. Last month, , UK, seemingly as a result of taking drugs – festival organisers warned of “a dangerous high-strength or bad-batch substance on site”.
Following the deaths, there have been renewed calls to have drug safety tests on-site at festivals and similar locations, to identify and inform people about the substances they have bought.
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“Roughly one in five drug users are being mis-sold drugs in the UK,” says Fiona Measham, a criminologist at Durham University, UK. Her drug-testing organisation, , will be operating at 10 UK festivals this year, and recently set up a facility in Bristol city centre. “The only reason that we are able to estimate this figure is because of our drug safety testing,” she says.
Novel psychoactive substances are a growing problem. In 2005, there were only 16 of these substances , but by 2016 that had risen to 560.
In response, the UK government decided to go on the offensive to tackle these “legal highs”. Instead of playing catch-up by retroactively banning drugs as they cropped up, the UK passed the , to make all such substances illegal.
It didn’t make much difference. This blanket ban on almost any psychoactive drug – the likes of caffeine and alcohol are excluded – was widely criticised for its poor science. The act defines the word “psychoactive” so loosely that it could apply to things like nutmeg and flowers.
“The courts still don’t know what is or is not covered by the act,” says Alex Stevens, who researches criminal justice at the University of Kent, UK. “And in many cases nor do the police.”
In the two years since the law was passed, the market for traditional street drugs and the former legal highs has merged. Dealers are now selling these cheaper designer drugs disguised as traditional recreational substances in an effort to cut costs. Unlike traditional street drugs, these designer drugs have not been formally studied in the lab. Their effects are dangerously unknown.
“You can literally go on the internet, hire a Chinese laboratory to take a known scheduled drug and tweak it into a new substance, then sell it in the US as MDMA or LSD,” says Madalyn McElwain of , a US-based non-profit dedicated to reducing drug harm at raves, nightclubs and festivals.
Organisations like The Loop or DanceSafe say people will take drugs, prohibition or no, so they want to reduce any unintended impact. They set up at festivals or nightclubs and invite people to drop off a sample of their drugs to be analysed, identifying the substances within and their strength. An hour later, the person returns to receive the results, along with a brief intervention to explain the risks and identify safe dosages.
Through these tests, DanceSafe has found that pills sold as MDMA, or ecstasy, are often something else entirely. The organisation , and found that only 60 per cent of the drugs that people believed were MDMA actually contained the compound. The fakes include bath salts, methamphetamine and a dangerous amphetamine known as PMA. “There are more chemicals in play,” says McElwain.
Dangerous highs
In Portugal, where drugs are decriminalised, a non-profit called Kosmicare provides on-site drug checking at the Boom music festival. In 2015, Kosmicare found that many samples of LSD its team tested there were actually N-BOMe, a dangerous synthetic hallucinogen that . But even when the sample is pure, Kosmicare can help people decide on a dosage based on the strength of their sample.
“The idea is that we have a chance to talk to them, understand their drug use patterns and give them tailored information based on their results,” says Helena Valente, director of Kosmicare. People who use the service welcome the information, she says – almost everyone returns for their results.
According to the , published last month, two-thirds of people said they would use such a service if it were available. But the survey also found that drug checking doesn’t seem to alter many people’s behaviour. Only around 11 per cent of respondents said testing changed the way they use drugs, while around 43 per cent said it simply reinforced what they already knew.
Testing alone isn’t enough, says Adam Winstock, who runs the survey. “Both drug checking and drug-law reform are needed to help people adopt safer drug-taking behaviours.”
Measham’s work suggests that safety testing does at least help some people. When The Loop set up at the Boomtown festival (pictured) in Hampshire, UK, last year, medical staff saw a 25 per cent decrease in drug-related incidents.
The Loop found that N-ethylpentylone was being sold as MDMA. The substance looks like MDMA, but instead of creating euphoric feelings for 3 to 6 hours, the drug produces anxiety and paranoia for 24 to 36 hours. The Loop also found malaria tablets, boric acid and plaster of Paris masquerading as party drugs.
When people at the festival were told about the results, . Kosmicare found an even stronger result: when festivalgoers were told their LSD was N-BOMe, around said they did not intend to take the drug anymore – though whether they followed through with this is unknown.
“The police were really happy because we were taking harmful drugs out of circulation,” says Measham. “The paramedics were happy because we were reducing drug-related harm, and the users were happy because we identified potentially harmful drugs.”
An incident in 2014 shows what happens when such services aren’t in place. That year, a red pill in the shape of the Superman logo was sold as ecstasy in many European countries. The Trimbos Institute, a drug-checking group in the Netherlands, through health centres and an app to inform people that the pills contained a , an MDMA substitute. No one in the Netherlands died, but in the UK, where alerts were not widely spread, .
“When people found out their drugs were fake, 18 per cent handed them over for destruction”
“One of the problems in countries without drug safety testing is you are waiting for someone to die or be hospitalised before you put out a warning,” says Measham.
But safety testing can only work properly in countries with a relatively liberal attitude towards drugs. The Loop only operate at festivals with support from the police, a stark difference when compared with the US. There, DanceSafe must work in secret because of the 2003 RAVE Act, a law designed to crack down on underground dance venues where organisers were promoting the use of illicit drugs.
The language of the law is so broad that it effectively bans drug checking: organisers can be prosecuted if they knowingly operate or profit from any place where drugs are being consumed. Festivals worry that organisations like DanceSafe could be seen as encouraging illegal drug use, although no one has yet been prosecuted in this way. As such, DanceSafe must take participants away from public view to do the testing, and does not state publicly which festivals it operates at.
McElwain hopes the success of drug safety checking elsewhere will lead to a change in US law. “People don’t want to die. People don’t want to have a bad experience,” she says. “People want to prepare before ingesting the chemical, and they will take the necessary steps. We are here to provide the tools.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “A dose of reality”
