Since last year’s law change we’ve had heaps more people making the smart choice and getting their gear checked with us. This is brilliant and we love that you’re doing it, especially considering the amount of eutylone we found!
Unfortunately, we were ridiculously under-resourced for the amount of people that wanted to come and see us. We had massive backlogs and wait times of up to two hours, which was longer than we’d ever seen before. We don’t want to have people waiting so long.Even one person who rolls the dice on their drugs and takes something harmful or potentially fatal disguised as something relatively low-risk when we could have prevented it, is one too many.
So we’re changing how we do things to make our process faster. We’re taking a leaf out of The Loop UK’s book and implementing a drop-off system. This new system will mean we can smash out tests quicker and see more of you per event.
How it works
- You bring us your drugs. We take enough to get a good reading, and give you a ticket with a unique ID number and an idea of how long it’ll take us to process your test.
- You go and enjoy yourself at the event. Go! Frolick! Make memories that aren’t sitting in a sweaty tent for hours on end!
- You come back before we close that day and one of our volunteers will take you through what we’ve found in your sample, return what’s left of your sample after testing, and discuss what you can do to minimise any chance of harm.
What’s changed?
Mainly, we won’t perform the checking in front of you any more. We figured if it’s a choice between sitting in a sweaty, hot tent for hours to watch 3 minutes of science versus dropping something off or going out and having an awesome time frolicking with your friends and coming back later, you’d much prefer to go out and have fun.
We can’t hang onto your stuff overnight
If you forget about your gear and don’t come back to collect it, we’re not going to hold on to it for you.
We’re only allowed to keep substances of interest if we’re sending them away for further analysis. Keeping a sample for any longer than we have to is still considered possession. We could lose our licence and won’t be allowed to operate any more.
We have a firm closing time every day, and any samples that have not been collected by the time we close will be destroyed.
Don’t lose your ticket – That’s the only way you get results and your sample back
If you show up and have lost your ticket with the ID number on it, we have no way of knowing that the drugs in question are yours. We can’t have people hassling our volunteers. There’s nothing to stop someone sifting by in the hopes of scoring someone else’s drugs. If we ‘return’ the drugs to someone without their ticket then this sketchy individual, that’s technically supply. We could lose our licence and won’t be allowed to operate any more, the volunteers involved could face legal action, and (worst of all) someone else has your drugs.
We’ll be moving to more durable and distinctive tickets, which should be able to stand up to spending the day in your wallet.
We’ll start the new system soon
We’re going to trial our new process at a couple of the regional clinics before getting into the season to iron out any bugs, so please be patient with us.
We want to keep as many people as we can from having to deal with the excessive bullshit with cathinone substitutions that we saw last summer. It was a shit time, and nobody wants to do that all again. This will help us do that.