DIY drug testing at Dragon Dreaming: An anonymous field report
Wednesday, 12 November, 2024.
If you attended Dragon Dreaming in Wee Jasper, NSW, you might have stumbled across someone offering to test your gear. Equally you could have missed the opportunity. It’s not like this harm reduction crusader had a big neon sign, a tent and a team of staff offering the service. The NSW government does not allow any mobile drug checking services at music festivals, so this practice is not strictly allowed. But sometimes people choose to ignore Big Brother. Sometime the DIY harm reduction spirit is too overpowering.
The evidence, after all, is that mobile and fixed-site drug checking services can save lives and prevent harm by alerting people to unexpected ingredients and a drug’s purity. These services also help educate people around safer use and they’re great for finding potentially dangerous drugs in circulation and publicising this information. This helps Australian health authorities issue public drug alerts. Drug checking is supported by the Public Health Association Australia, Australian Medical Association, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Royal Australian College of Physicians, and Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP).
What were the test results?
Our anonymous drug checker used a variety of DIY drug test kits to obtain as much accuracy as possible. It’s still never going to be accurate as a service run by The Loop Australia. But some interesting results did emerge.
The high proportion of ketamine samples tested reflects what many people have been saying for years: ket is everywhere. It’s the new king in the party drug scene.
On a more serious note, 4 out of 31 samples tested included a substance or substances that weren’t expected. That’s 12.9% of samples. It’s a fair chunk.
Most concerningly, one batch of ketamine contained both ket and a synthetic cathinone. Synthetic cathinones are a family of niche stimulant drugs that mimic the effects of MDMA and meth and can be dangerous, particularly when taken in combination with other drugs.
This particular finding may be a sign of what is to come in Australia. A couple of weeks ago, NSW Health and NUAA issued a drug alert around a high-dose MDMA pill containing a synthetic cathinone. But cathinones are not just appearing as adulterants, as unexpected substances. People are beginning to see them as desirable drugs in their own right. Synthetic cathinones, such as 3-MMC and 4-MMC, aka mephredone, M-cat or bath salts, have recently exploded in popularity in Europe. Media reports suggest these drugs are flooding Berlin nightlife scenes. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, people are increasingly starting to inject mephedrone.
But back to Dragon: one batch of LSD (acid) contained an unknown LSD analogue (in other words, a drug mimicking the effects of acid), a cocaine sample contained both coke and ice and a supposed MDMA batch in fact contained an amphetamine.
Our source kept a notebook with all the test results from Dragon and helpfully put it all into a spreadsheet!
What does our anonymous drug tester have to say about the process?
Users News had a chat with our anonymous drug tester to get the behind-the-scenes lowdown on the challenges, quirks and rewards of testing people’s drugs at Australia’s most iconic bush doof. Here’s the transcript:
Why did you decide to test people’s drugs at Dragon Dreaming this year?
Honestly, it gives me a sense of purpose and I get a kick out of teaching people something new. I'm also sick of waiting for the NSW government to approve pill testing and think that the festival community needs these kinds of tools right now.
Was there a particular demographic at the doof you targeted for this DIY drug testing?
Initially I was just testing for my friends, but I ended up attracting a bit of attention from nearby campers. I realised I had tested 3 ketamine samples sourced from the same dealer, so on the Friday I made it my mission to find some dealers on site so I could test the drugs at the source.
How did people generally respond to you approaching them and asking them if they want their drugs checked?
To my surprise, most of the dealers I found were eager to get their drugs tested. They were proud of their products and wanted to share the test results with their customers. There was one person selling cocaine that told me to get lost, but most people were very eager to learn more about the kits and the processes involved.
What were people’s reactions after you tested their drugs?
Most of the substances tested came back with the expected results, surprisingly a lot of people expected a bad result. For the people whose drugs indicated red flags, they were quite trusting of the process and were curious about what harm reduction measures to take if they were to try the substance. There were also people who were stoked they had a different substance!
What testing equipment did you use? How much do these test kits cost and how easy are they to use?
The reagent kits I used were purchased from Colorimetric Reagents Sydney, I had Marquis, Mecke, Mandelin, Lieberman, Ehrlich and Hoffman. When testing a variety of substances, it's really important to have a whole bunch of different kits, as they are used to test for different drugs. The cost comes down to about 10 cents per test, per reagent, so less than a dollar per substance tested. I also had fentanyl strips I got for free from NUAA's NSP on Crown Street.
The reagents are really easy to use and a lot of people said they'd look into getting their own after the festival.
How accurate is the data you’ve collected? In other words, are the limits to what you can find out with home reagent test kits?
Reagents are used to identify "red flags" not "green lights", meaning that they are only useful for finding unwanted adulterants. These kits cannot measure purity or tell you exactly what drug you have, however, the more reagents you use, the more you are informed to make safe choices. Unfortunately, because we don't have pill testing services in NSW yet, reagent testing is the best we've got for now.
As an example, one of the ketamine samples showed a yellow colour change when there should have been no colour change. This indicates there is something in the mix that's not ketamine, we checked the colour chart and based off the other results we think that it contained a synthetic cathinone. But there's over 100 possible cathinones, so that's where reagents stop being useful, and why we need evidence based pill testing in NSW.
Any last comments?
Get yourself a set of reagent kits, they're easy to use and might save your life one day.