Does drug checking work?
Thursday, 20 March, 2025.
The NSW Drug Checking Service at Yours & Owls. Photo courtesy: Kayleigh Emmerson, DanceWize NSW Team Leader.
If you attended 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. No, we’re not talking about the Dancewize tent. We’re talking about NSW’s first festival drug checking service.
Provided by NSW Health and NUAA, the organisation that publishes Users News, this is part of a 12-month pilot project for drug checking at music festivals.
But, as with any new harm reduction service, people naturally raise a number of concerns. You may be asking yourself: how does this service work? And what’s the deal with sniffer dogs and cops at these same music festivals? Furthermore, is this service even effective?
What is “pill testing”?
The NSW drug checking service is intended to help people who used drugs make informed choices about the drugs they put in their body. To maximise engagement, it’s a free and completely anonymous service. Peer workers from NUAA provide non-judgemental peer support to help festival goers navigate the service, while qualified chemists check the contents of drug samples.
Drug checking is sometimes known as “pill testing” although this latter name is a bit misleading. Powders, liquids and crystalline substances, as well as pills, can all be tested. Plant matter such as cannabis and magic mushrooms cannot be tested, however.
The NSW festival pilot came out of the Drug Summit held late last year. There has been some frustration that it’s just a pilot rather than a full roll-out of permanent festival and fixed-site drug testing throughout the state. But the government’s cautious and incremental approach reflects the long history of opposition to pill testing in NSW. Previous governments have been reluctant to challenge well-established lobbies wedded to the tough on crime/“just say no” approach to drug issues.
NUAA is committed to making the pilot a success because it’s a valuable chance to obtain the evidence on which to base an alternative approach.
It’s also a necessary step towards decriminalisation because decriminalisation without harm reduction services, such as pill testing, safe injecting rooms, rehab facilities, long-term support services and widespread naloxone training, could actually result in more overdose deaths, not fewer.
How much of my drugs will I need to give up for testing?
Almost none. The chemists only need a miniscule amount, comparable to the head of a matchstick. If you present staff with a pill, for example, they will only scrape off a tiny fraction of it.
The main thing to note here is that we have a limit of 2 substances we can test per person who visits the service.
Does drug checking give people a green light to binge on drugs?
People who don’t like harm reduction services tend to say they encourage drug use, and some media outlets have unfortunately chosen this angle for their news reporting on the NSW drug checking pilot. However, it’s unlikely that anyone will decide to go out and score drugs because they saw a drug testing service. The services is targeted at people already intending to use drugs who already have drugs in their possession. Numerous studies have shown that the presence of police and sniffer dogs encourage higher-risk drug taking behaviour by festivalgoers, who will consume drugs at music events regardless of whether police are present.
Moreover, there has already been extensive evaluation of pill testing services that exist in Europe, the Americas, New Zealand and other Australian states. This has found that, far from encouraging increased drug use, testing services encourage caution.
Summing up the evidence from overseas and the ACT (then the only Australian jurisdiction with drug testing) a 2022 Alcohol and Drug Foundation report published these key takeaways from the evidence:
People said they would wait for a test result before taking the drug.
If pill testing found a bad result, the majority of people said they wouldn’t take it and would inform their friends.
When a substance linked to overdoses was found, in each case the person discarded the drug sample.
People reported changing their behaviour after using a drug checking service.
Most people claimed their knowledge of health and harm reduction information improved.
With testing having only taken place at one festival in NSW so far, it’s too early to make a thorough evaluation of our particular service. What the preliminary data from the Yours & Owls testing shows is that MDMA, ketamine, and cocaine were the most common drugs brought in for testing and that 11% of samples contained a substance that the person with the drugs wasn’t expecting. Anecdotal evidence tell us that a high proportion of these samples were then discarded in amnesty bins.
This matches with the evidence from overseas and interstate. According to a 2024 report by UNSW’s Drug Policy Monitoring Program, 86% of service users in Portugal and 69% in the UK “who received test results indicating that the drug was different than expected did not go on to consume the substance. About half of service users (50% Portugal, 59% UK) whose test results indicated that their drugs were stronger than expected took a smaller dose than usual.”
Ok, but can this service really detect all drugs and their potency?
Some detractors have questioned whether pill checking services can effectively test drugs for their strength and detect niche new drugs.
These claims are often inaccurate or, at the very least, heavily exaggerated.
The equipment used can detect all known drugs that have previously been tested with these devices. But the technology can’t identify every single new lab-made substance. If we do discover an unknown (really new) substance in a batch, our drug testers will inform the person who brought it. We will tell them very clearly that they have something potentially very dangerous in their drugs. If the service user consents, we will then send the sample to a lab for further testing
If the unknown substance turns out to be hazardous, this will lead to NSW Health and NUAA issuing a public drug alert.
When it comes to testing the strength of drugs, our equipment won’t be able to test the purity of everything. We may only be able to give you its comparative strength. In other words, we may need to simply tell you that it’s a lower, similar or higher dose compared to the average expected strength of the drug in question.
For some common drugs, such as MDMA and coke we can give you a fairly accurate indication of its strength.
Far from giving punters a false sense of security, peer workers at the NSW drug checking service inform all service users of the limitations of testing and that no level of illicit drug consumption is safe. Service users actually need to sign a waiver noting they’re aware of this!
How do I know police won’t target me for using this service?
103 festival punters used the drug checking service at Yours & Owls. We are hoping that over the course of the pilot these numbers will increase, and there is some encouraging evidence from other states. For example, the number of people accessing drug checking at Canberra’s Groovin the Moo festival doubled from 117 to 234 between 2018, when the service was first provided, and 2019.
As Clancy Beckers, the peer lead for this service, explained at an EXPAND webinar hosted by NUAA after Yours & Owls, it’s natural for people to be apprehensive at first.
“It’s going to take people a while to warm up to this service,” they said. “We’re taught to have a strong bodily reaction to people in a uniform asking about drugs. So people do have this fear and their concern is warranted. It’s not like we’ve all of a sudden gotten to decriminalisation. We’re not there yet.”
But we can reassure you this is a 100% confidential service. The layout of the space is designed so that the service shares a tent with DanceWize NSW. As a result, nobody can tell if someone is entering the space to go chat to DanceWize staff or use the drug checking service. There’s also a concrete policy that no cops will come near the service.
Clancy Beckers, Peer Lead for the NSW Drug Checking Service, on the left and Tim Powell, Dancewize NSW Lead, on the right. Photo courtesy: Kayleigh Emmerson, DanceWize NSW Team Leader.
However, there will still be the usual police and sniffer dog presence at the festivals where the service is offered, which is problematic but unavoidable.
“It’s not rocket science to work out that a heavy police presence, with dogs and the threat of strip searches, at a music festival would impact the effectiveness of any pill testing service being provided at that same festival,” NSW Greens drug law reform spokesperson Cate Faehrmann said in a March 7 interview.
As well as calling for comprehensive drug law reform, such as decriminalisation, NUAA has long argued against the use of statistically inaccurate sniffer dogs, as have other experts. People consuming more drugs than they had initially planned to avoid detection by police has even been cited by the Coroners Court as contributing to deaths at festivals.
While the aim of policing is supposedly disrupting supply, heavy policing with drug dogs at music festivals (and railway stations, for that matter) is clearly targeting use, not supply. Furthermore, there is a well-documented link between the use of sniffer dogs, on the one hand, and over-policing of marginalised communities and (allegedly unlawful) strip searches, on the other hand.
The point of all this is the following: you’ll still have to deal with the intimidating presence of cops and sniffer dogs at large-scale NSW festivals, but you’ll be perfectly safe entering and exiting our drug checking service. You have genuine legal protections within this unique pill testing zone.
What happens at the end of the 12-month trial?
At the end of this trial, the state government will evaluate its success and decide whether this service will become a permanent feature of NSW festivals, and whether NSW should follow the ACT, Queensland and Victoria and have permanent fixed-site drug checking services accessible to the wider public.
We are confident that the roll-out of festival testing will provide helpful results and add to the mounting evidence that drug checking services reduce drug-related harms. Hopefully this will lead to fixed-site drug checking services in Sydney and regional centres throughout NSW. This is very important as most illegal drugs are not actually consumed at music festivals, and music festivals are often really expensive to attend in the first place!
The more harm reduction services are out there saving lives and preventing hospitalisations, the more apparent it should become what works and what doesn’t work.