Today we’re celebrating two years of the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Act 2021. This was a landmark piece of legislation that let us move from a “giving the law the side-eye while we discreetly continue to test drugs” position to a place where we can stand proud and say “WE TEST DRUGS” and no one can come arrest us, festival organisers, or our clients for it.
A quick timeline…
In 2015, Wendy Allison was approached by festival medics who were concerned about people taking what they thought was MDMA getting sick, with symptoms you would not expect from MDMA. As they said, it was only a matter of time before someone died. At the time the options were
- Ignore the problem and hope it went away by itself
- Get the Police involved and take a prohibitionist approach (which never ever works for anything. We’ve already gotten spicy about this in our last 4 blogs)
- Introduce harm reduction
The third option was the obvious choice, so that’s what we did, and hoped we wouldn’t get arrested. So far nobody’s been arrested, so we’re counting it as a win.
In 2017 we released our first report with data gathered from the previous years, showing that drug checking was effective – people were changing their behaviour and making safer choices after visiting KnowYourStuffNZ. This is about when we started to gain public attention for our work.
For the next 3 years we continued to test drugs at our own cost and risk and make our findings public, all the while talking loudly and consistently about what we were doing and why it’s a good idea. At first there was opposition, but over time that turned to support – polls in 2020 showed 75% of the public supported drug checking.
In 2020, we presented more research that drug checking is an effective harm reduction measure. The Government, unconvinced, commissioned a $60,000 study from Victoria University of Wellington academic Fiona Hutton who confirmed the numbers we presented. Not to say ‘we told you so’…but also.
What was it like before legalisation?
Tricky, to say the least. We had no formal agreement with the Police to keep our volunteers safe, but at the same time they didn’t bother us or our clients, they just quietly let us get on with it in acknowledgment of the good work that we were doing.
Festival medics were in full support of us. Event organisers were as well – but unfortunately by having us at their festival, they were basically admitting that they knew people took drugs at their festivals. This meant they could therefore be prosecuted under section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act for providing a venue for people to take drugs. Still a few brave events (shot, Splore, Aum, KiwiBurn, Twisted Frequency and Taniwha’s Den) took the risk and brought us on site.
Another sticky point was that we couldn’t legally handle the drugs ourselves. If a client handed their drugs to us, they could be done for supply and we could be done for possession. So the testing process meant us taking a client into the backroom and coaching them through how to load their samples onto the spectrometer.
At times it was funny (if you’ve seen anyone try to attempt fine motor skills with tiny amounts of loose powder a few days into a festival) and at other times frustrating (if you’ve seen anyone try to attempt fine motor skills with tiny amounts of loose powder a few days into a festival). But overall it was a slow process, meaning people were left lining up in the hot sun to use our services.
Law change = positive change
The Act has changed most of this. In no particular order, here’s seven major changes that have come around since the law changed:
- More orgs getting licencedand doing their own drug checking (New Zealand Needle Exchange and Te Puna Whakaiti Pāmamae Kai Whakapiri New Zealand Drug Foundation) within the communities they serve
- More awareness of drug harm reduction at events – yay we can advertise our services and increase the knowledge that we exist!
- Expansion into new areas – We’ve gone from 2 very clandestine centres (Wellington and Auckland) to 5 main hubs and satellites in Rotorua, Raglan, and Tauranga
- Diversity of checking clinics and partnerships. We currently bring drug checking to university O weeks and community organisations like the Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective
- Finding novel substances before they do too much damage. In the last 2 years we’ve found 3 ketamine analogues, xylazine, some new nitazines, and a handful of new cathinones being sold as more trusted substances.
- High Alert. Now that we can legally check what’s in peoples’ drugs and keep finding new substances, we have an early warning system to let people know when something we find is high risk
- MO’ SPECS MO’ SCIENCE – we’ve gone from 5 in 2021 to (soon to be) 12 nationally. This means we can do MORE drug checking in MORE places
More drug checkers means more drug checking. But what does that actually mean?
Let’s focus for a second on expansion into new areas and having more drug checking organisations on deck. This is huge. How huge?
Look, we’ve been saying since day dot that serving festival-goers with drug checking services is not addressing the majority drug harm in New Zealand. We’ve made no secret of the fact that our clientele through festivals are predominantly young, white, and wealthy.
It’s an unfortunate fact that this made getting the law changed easier. It made an easy and compelling argument to middle New Zealanders and politicians who had kids of festival-going age. When there was just enough political will to do something about it we lobbied these groups hard and helped push the new legislation through.
The great part of law changes is that they apply to everyone. Moving drug checking from a “la la la fingers in the ears” area where the authorities turn a blind eye to what we do to a legally protected one opened up the door for other organisations who have relationships in more vulnerable and less privileged communities to get their drug checking licence, buy spectrometers, train their staff, and start serving their communities.
Why is this big? Ok so the main way that drug checking reduces harm is that it identifies the substance the person is taking. Once you know what you’ve got, you can work out your dose, what’s the best way to take it, and what you need to do to mitigate any risks. This means that the risk of accidental overdose from substances that have extra psychoactives in them or substances that have been substituted for something else is massively reduced. You can imagine what that would mean to someone who is part of a vulnerable community and doesn’t have access to stigma-free information and/or healthcare.
What next?
We’ve had one law changed…why not more? There’s a word for people that do the same thing over and over again expecting different results, and we’ve outlined just how badly the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 has failed the people of Aotearoa in the last 4 blogs we’ve written.
Read the MoDA Has to go Part 1: How it started
Read the MoDA Has to go Part 2: The War on “Drugs”
Read the MoDA Has to go Part 3: How it’s going
Read the MoDA Has to go Part 4: The changes Aotearoa deserves
But we also appreciate change makes people nervous and takes time. So our first baby steps are:
- Safe consumption sites for people who take drugs. We already have them, they’re called bars. So why can’t we extend that model to other drugs?
- Remove ‘random’ drug testing in the workplace.
Read us getting spicy over random drug checking, prescription psychoactives and employment law
So watch this space. It took us 5 years to get drug checking legalised, maybe these won’t take as long?