Benzodiazepines, aka benzos, are exploding in popularity, especially among young people in Australia. But people aren’t just sourcing their benzos from people with prescriptions, there’s a huge fake benzo markets with frequent quality control issues. It’s an underground subculture filled with unmarked cliff edges and landslides. So just how do you navigate it safely?

At Yours & Owls festival in Wollongong, you may have noticed a unique service hidden away inside a white tent, a safe space where punters could discuss their drug use history and intentions. This was NSW’s first festival drug checking service. But, as with any new harm reduction service, people naturally raise a number of concerns. Users News is here to provide the answers.

Users News chat to a peer about all things DMT. From vaping DMT and launching into another dimension to smoking changa, this is your guide on what to expect with one of the world’s strongest psychedelics.

We already know so much about what doctors, researchers and policy-makers believe about ice but we rarely read firsthand accounts from people who use amphetamines. We also rarely read articles that go beyond the usual media narratives and binary logic of good/bad, medical/recreational, therapeutic/harmful and soft/hard drugs. Consider this article a correction of that trend.

In a first for NSW, NUAA, the organisation that publishes Users News, will be teaming up with NSW Health to provide a drug checking service at the Yours & Owls festival in Wollongong on the March 1-2 weekend. NUAA will be providing peer support to help festival goers navigate the new service with zero judgment.

Data suggests that a high proportion of people with ADHD use meth. But why is this? Users News chats to ADHD peers who have self-medicated with meth to find out why so many ADHD folks gravitate towards illegal amphetamines and why this behaviour often contradicts the stigmatising stories about meth we see in mainstream media.

Users News looks into some lesser known facts about hep C, exploring the transmission routes that don’t get discussed publicly as much. Everything from dodgy cosmetic surgeries to fights in jail.

Users News investigates the interaction between weed and psychedelics, diving into the scientific research and chatting to peers.

The long-awaited NSW Drug Summit has finally taken place, and NUAA (the organisation that publishes Users News) worked hard to make sure that voices of people with lived and living experience of illicit drug use were represented. While we won’t see the government’s final recommendations until early 2025, on December 19 NSW Premier Chris Minns announced a welcome step in the right direction — drug sample testing at festivals.