Sending a message with substance
Festival-goers will use drugs regardless, write Wendy Allison and Jez Weston, so let’s try to keep them safe
The Herald’s editorial last Friday raises the concern that “testing drugs for safety can send the wrong message”.
As the leaders of KnowYourStuffNZ, the organisation providing drug safety testing at music festivals, we know that few young people care about what message the Government, or the Herald, sends about drug use. Festival-goers will use drugs regardless.
KnowYourStuffNZ sends a message festival-goers do care about with every test we perform: that we don't want people to die and we trust our clients to make safer decisions with the information we give them. People listen to our message and the results from our work are clear.
When people have drugs that are contaminated or more dangerous than expected, the majority will not take them and many destroy them in front of us.
For an endorsement of our results, ask the medics at festivals we attend. Every single one will say how thankful they are for our service and how obvious it is that we are reducing drug-related harms.
Moralising doesn’t change people's behaviour. Respectful, useful, nonjudgmental information does.
Despite its qualms, the Herald rightly asks the important question: “Exactly how are these drug-testing stations at music festivals going to work?”
We’ve been asking this too and we look forward to open and evidence-based consideration of some particular matters.
The legal situation for testing services needs to be clarified. For instance, we only require a tiny amount (much less than a pill) for testing. It’s never returned to the client as that would be the crime of supply. We're fine with that. However, we would like to be allowed to hold a substance so that we could take a sample for laboratory analysis. Currently we can't do that. This summer we have already seen one new synthetic cathinone — a substance known as bath salts, often sold as MDMA — we could not identify using our field FT-IR spectrometer. Using a fully equipped lab, it could have been identified.
The liability of testing services needs to be set. For instance, we never describe a sample as “safe”, as every substance has risks (except maybe the pill that was mostly toothpaste). We never describe a sample as “not contaminated”, as every testing method has its limits. We already provide warnings about the specific drugs identified and advice on safer behaviour as part of the testing process. Despite this, there will still be harms from drug use, even for people who have used a testing service, just as there are for any health service.
Our service and other harm reduction developments should be linked. The Government is introducing a drug early warning system, where police, Customs, and district health boards provide alerts about dangerous drugs. We’ve been doing this for several years — our latest warning on n-ethylpentylone reached more than 80,000 people. So how will we be included in that? Is everyone working in this space willing to share information? We hope so.
The required quality of testing services should be decided. We don't want a repeat of the methamphetamine scam where any cowboy could set up testing. Right now there is no accreditation for testing services and no formal training or qualifications for volunteers. For example, what equipment is suitable? We think the laser spectrometers used by police at Rhythm and Vines are too likely to give false readings, whereas the FT-IR spectrometers we use are much better at distinguishing substances and mixtures. However, our spectrometers cost more than twice as much, so we can see the temptation to use cheaper equipment.
There's also a discussion to be had about how this is funded. Currently, we are funded entirely by donations. This isn't sustainable if, as Police Minister Stuart Nash suggests, testing should be at all large summer festivals. That's a major scale-up. We have been lucky to be gifted the use of our testing equipment by the New Zealand Drug Foundation, but a spectrometer runs to $50,000. That's not possible for a volunteer-run organisation. A range of business models are possible, from public funding as for the NZ Needle Exchange Programme, to support from the Criminal Proceeds Fund or festival organisers paying.
Drug safety testing is an evolving field with different models used in different countries. We are working with groups in the UK and Australia to develop best practice and are happy to learn from groups in Europe who have been testing drugs for nearly 20 years.
We look forward to discussing these questions as the Government puts in place legislation to enable us to operate openly. It is in everyone's interests to make sure drug-testing at music festivals does work.