Advocacy

9 facts to dispel myths about drug checking

There has been plenty of misinformation going around about drug checking in the last week. To counter that, here are some facts:

Fact 1. We do not hand drugs back to people after testing. Testing requires a tiny amount of the substance. It is not handled by the tester at all. The person intending to take a drug places a tiny amount of their drug on the spectrometer and it is destroyed in the process of testing.

Fact 2. We never tell people their drugs are safe. The first thing we say to people is that the safest drug use is not to use drugs at all. Then we have a discussion with each person about the risks of the substance they plan to take. Drug checking facilities provide specific education about the risks of drug use.

Fact 3. The service is not publicly funded. It runs entirely on donations. KnowYourStuffNZ is not seeking public funding. The proposed law change would allow the service to be funded by event ticket sales.

Fact 4. Many people do have their drugs tested when it’s made available to them. We did 800 tests last summer. That is 16x more than our first year.

Fact 5. Our data this year shows that 62% of people will choose not to take their drugs if it tests for something other than what they thought it was.

Fact 6. In New Zealand there are over 70 different types of substances being sold as 3-4 types of illegal drugs.

Fact 7. Some of these substances are life threatening and/or much stronger than the substance that people think they are buying. This can cause them to require medical assistance or even to be hospitalised. We can identify these adulterants and excessive doses of known substances.

Fact 8. This isn’t just about testing drugs to reduce harm. This is about collecting data to pass on to medics so that they know what they are dealing with and have a better chance of treating any medical issues correctly.

Fact 9. For many people who use drugs, going to a drug checking tent will be the first time they have had a respectful and informed conversation about the risks. We provide non-judgemental advice and information to help people be safer. That results in people making smarter, more informed decisions about drug use both at events and outside those events.

Our work over five years demonstrates that drug checking reduces harm. We would like to get on with reducing harm. Replacing myths with facts will help.

KnowYourStuffNZ is a not-for-profit social enterprise funded by donations from the community. If you value our work, please donate.

Advocacy

KnowYourStuffNZ’s submission on the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill

On the reclassification of AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB as Class A drugs

Reclassification of substances to increase penalties associated with their use and supply has historically failed to reduce either use or harm. In this case, because the community most affected by these substances is already marginalised, the reclassification is likely to hurt them more, by increasing stigma, making it harder to seek treatment, and increasing the negative effects of any convictions associated with drug use.

The law that this classification system supports is inadequate and the classification system itself is flawed, therefore it is our view that adding further substances to this is an inappropriate response to drug harm. We do not support this amendment, and would suggest that a full review of the Misuse of Drugs Act to align it with evidence and the government’s intended health-based approach to drugs would be more effective.

On discretion around prosecutions for use and possession of all drugs

While moving from a presumption of prosecution to a presumption of non-prosecution with an onus on prosecutors to prove public interest is an improvement on the current situation, we have some concerns. Our main concern is that police discretion has historically been applied unequally, and that the benefits of this change will not reach those who most need it -the poor and marginalised who are currently subjected to the harshest policing.

Additionally, it is our view that the role of the police is to enforce the law, not to interpret it. Therefore, the law they are required to enforce should be clear enough to be applied equally to all situations. Police should not be required to exercise discretion.

If drugs are an issue of public health, they should be clearly treated as such by the law. This amendment goes some way to acknowledging this, but should only be considered as an interim measure until a full review of the MoDA is implemented.

We support this amendment with reservations.

On the new temporary drug class

We do not consider that the addition of a new class to a flawed system will reduce either use or harm associated with new psychoactive substances. Historically when new drugs have been classified, manufacturers have responded by making more new drugs. This has led to increased harm as the new substances are generally more potent and less well researched. The new class will make classification faster, however that will most likely only encourage a faster cycle of new drugs emerging.

As an organisation that exists to address the harms associated with illicit drugs and which came into being in a large part because of the dangers of new psychoactive substances, we cannot support a system that encourages the development of more new drugs.

We do not support this amendment, and again recommend that the MoDA undergo a full review to refocus drug legislation away from the minutiae of criminalisation and instead to enable pragmatic and public health focused harm reduction measures.

KnowYourStuffNZ is a not-for-profit social enterprise funded entirely by donations from the community. If you value our work, please donate.

Advocacy

Where to from here?

Early in the New Year, Police Minister Hon Stuart Nash, speaking about drug checking at festivals, said “I think they’re a fantastic idea and should be installed at all our festivals.” While this was met with cautious optimism from those seeking reform, not everyone was celebrating. An editorial in the NZ Herald raised the concern that “Testing drugs for safety can send the wrong message”. Nearly everyone agreed that we need to understand the implications before proceeding.

As the leaders of KnowYourStuffNZ, the organisation providing drug safety testing at music festivals, we would like to reassure everyone that few young people care about what message the government, or the NZ Herald, is sending about drug use. Festival-goers will continue to use drugs regardless.

KnowYourStuffNZ sends a message that festival-goers do care about, with every test we perform. The message: 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 will destroy their drugs in front of us. For an endorsement 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. Respect, useful information, and a non-judgemental stance does.

Despite their qualms, the NZ Herald rightly asks the important question – “Exactly how are these drug-testing stations at music festivals going to work?” We’ve been asking ourselves this question too and we look forward to open and evidence-based consideration of the following 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 be in possession of a substance so that we could take a sample away for laboratory analysis. Currently we can’t do that. We have already seen one new cathinone this summer that 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 limits on what it will detect. We already provide warnings about the specific drugs identified and advice on safer behaviour as a 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 are 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 now – our January warning on n-ethylpentylone reached over 80,000 people. So how will this system work? 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 that 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 the 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. There are a range of business models possible, from public funding as for the NZ Needle Exchange Programme, support from the Criminal Proceeds Fund, to festivals paying and on-charging in the ticket price just as they do for the portaloos. What funding model will be the best fit with this service? We don’t know yet.

To be fair, 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 twenty 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 that drug-testing stations at music festivals do work.