Festivalgoers report alarming reactions to drugs

AUCKLAND: Hundreds of New Year festivalgoers have reported alarming symptoms — including paranoia, seizures, severe nausea and inability to sleep for days — after taking chemicals sold to them as MDMA, or ecstasy.

The wave of bad reactions may be yet another consequence of the disruption caused by the Covid19 pandemic.

The reports, nearly 1000 so far, have come in messages to the harm reduction service Know Your Stuff.

“I was lying in bed thinking I might die in my sleep but I was too scared to move and get help,” reads one message viewed by the Weekend Herald.

Another reported a severe panic attack on the road home from a festival — which required an ambulance callout — and several reported suffering hallucinations after being discharged by hospital emergency departments. At least one reported the urgent involvement of mental health services.

Another group of messages thanks Know Your Stuff for the warning it issued on December 29 about eutylone, the substance believed to be responsible.

Inspector Blair MacDonald, manager of the National Drug Intelligence Bureau, confirmed that “this festival season has seen an increase in the detection of eutylone”, a synthetic cathinone, adding that there were likely to be a range of reasons for the increase.

“The impact of Covid19 on the international drug market has seen MDMA less readily available in New Zealand,” he said.

Many of the reports have come from events the service was unable to operate at, including two of the biggest,

Rhythm and Vines and Northern Bass.

Know Your Stuff’s drugchecking activities were formally legalised before Christmas, but the organisation lacked the resources to cover events that now felt comfortable inviting the group on site.

Know Your Stuff director Wendy Allison said cathinones had been picked up in the group’s testing in previous years, but at one New Year event where the group provided drugtesting services, more than half the samples tested were synthetic cathinones.

By comparison, last summer the group found more than 80% of samples presented as MDMA were what they were meant to be.

“The vast majority of that has been eutylone,” Ms Allison said.

“There’s been a few other things, but 99% of it has been eutylone. It’s just everywhere.”

Know Your Stuff had picked up a sudden rise in detection of eutylone at testing clinics it ran late last year, she said, but “it wasn’t till we got to the festivals that we realised that we had vastly underestimated how bad it was going to be”.

Know Your Stuff’s warning, which was republished on the policeoperated High Alert website, does appear to have had some impact. Shops selling reagent tests — which can identify cathinones so long as they have not been mixed with real MDMA — swiftly sold out. Some festivalgoers reported testing and then disposing of their party drugs and others followed the advice to not take any substance that could not be tested. But many others went ahead.

“Dave” (21), who went to Northern Bass, said he had bought what he was told was MDMA from a former schoolmate: “I asked all the usual questions and he said, ‘yeah yeah, it’s all good, I’ve tested it’. I figured he wouldn’t be one to lie to me.”

He had a sign that was not the truth on his first night staying near the festival site, when he tried some and “I didn’t get a single minute of sleep. I was awake and fidgety and my gut was really sore, but at that point I thought maybe I’d just had too much or I hadn’t been eating properly”.

Unsure if the drug had caused the symptoms, he had more on successive nights and felt much worse. He did eventually manage to sleep after New Year’s Eve: “But I slept on my front because I was scared I was going to vomit and choke in my sleep. If I’d been around medics at that point, I definitely would have gone.”

It wasn’t until he saw users’ stories posted by Know Your Stuff that he realised what had happened to him. — The New Zealand Herald