People have always had to fight for the right to test their drugs, to get information about whether they’re likely to cause a horrendously intense trip, or death. But now, two suppliers of drug-testing kits are embroiled in an acrimonious row over ownership of the technology behind certain potentially life-saving products, highlighting the difficult relationship between harm reduction and profit.
German startup Miraculix, the manufacturer of “QTests” to ascertain the potency of the psychedelics MDMA, psilocybin and LSD, recently served a cease-and-desist letter to Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe—a nonprofit that pioneered rave harm reduction in the United States—to prevent his company HRDS from distributing similar tests.
For Sferios, Miraculix is attempting to monopolize life-saving testing technology that has been in the public domain for decades. But Miraculix says its kits are novel, and that the dispute stems from a refusal to agree to a deal to make Sferios their exclusive US distributor.
Miraculix claims that after a relatively short period of selling the tests exclusively on its behalf, and allegedly not reaching the agreed minimum sales levels, Sferios reverse-engineered the company’s tests and started selling them himself.
“Attempting to patent established scientific processes is not only legally questionable but ethically problematic when it involves tools that save lives.”
Sferios, who founded HRDS and is no longer affiliated with DanceSafe, strenuously rejects this ownership claim. “These testing methods have been part of the scientific record for nearly 100 years,” he said in a statement. “Attempting to patent established scientific processes is not only legally questionable but ethically problematic when it involves tools that save lives. We’ve always operated from a place of scientific transparency, giving proper credit to the researchers who developed these reagents decades ago.”
Dr. Felix Blei, Miraculix’s scientific head and managing director, “developed innovative and precise methods for detecting substances such as psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA,” the June 11 letter from Miraculix’s legal team stated. Blei developed these methods as part of his PhD work at Friedrich Schiller University, “laying the foundation for our client’s business activities,” it added.
But Sferios says that he and his associate Matthew Aragón developed their own Purity Test Kits using widely known reagent methods, and that no contract had ever been agreed setting expected sales levels. His lawyer wrote in response to Miraculix that the company’s claims “strain credulity” and rejected the terms of the cease-and-desist declaration, potentially setting the stage for further legal wranglings.
In 2022, Miraculix lodged a patent application for its tests, including those for opiate derivatives, which was subject to an initial rejection by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on July 2, 2025.
Sferios, who has previously developed other testing kits using known reagents, wrote on July 23 that Miraculix never provided him with any confidential information about how it makes its tests. “Matt and I were perfectly within our rights to create harm reduction tools using publicly available information and our own knowledge and expertise,” wrote Sferios, who also spoke to Filter for this report.
Sferios has described spending months working on creating the tests and conducting some 2,000 experiments to arrive at the current models, which can test samples of LSD down to the microgram and MDMA pills down to milligrams. He based the products on the Hofmann and Marquis reagents, he said—century-old methods that nobody can own.
Sferios said he started working with Miraculix in November 2022 because he “believed quantitative test kits were an important addition to consumer drug checking.”
In May, he published an online article titled “How to Make a Purity Test Kit,” in which he wrote, “the basic idea is to balance the strength and volume of the reagent with the amount of drug added in order to land on the Beer-Lambert spectrum. This is a narrow linear color spectrum that correlates with the concentration of substance dissolved in a solution—a physical law of analytical chemistry that dates back to the 18th century.”
Sferios said he started working with Miraculix in November 2022 because he “believed quantitative test kits were an important addition to consumer drug checking.”
In an earlier post on the QTests.org site Sferios set up to sell Miraculix’s tests, he wrote: “QTests were developed in 2022 by Dr. Felix Blei in Jenna, Germany. A product of years of research, they are the world’s first quantitative reagent test kits.”
Based on “good faith and trust” Sferios said, he began selling Miraculix kits before contract negotiations were complete, but after six months “Miraculix abandoned the negotiations and opened their own US distribution center in direct competition with me.”
This, he said, was after he had spent around $20,000 on custom boxes for the US market, edited their English-language material and provided “invaluable” marketing advice. But he continued to sell the kits, partly because he wanted to make back the money he had spent.
“It was also during a tumultuous time for me,” he wrote, referring to major strife at DanceSafe. “I left and helped the chapters start a new nonprofit, Grassroots Harm Reduction.”
Miraculix claims that Sferios was representing DanceSafe when they first met, and within two years their relationship soured. Sferios claims that a non-disclosure agreement he signed with Miraculix was as a representative of HRDS, and that Miraculix knew “within a few days” of their first meeting that he was not representing DanceSafe. DanceSafe did not respond to Filter’s request for comment.
“It was highly concerning to us when Mr. Sferios and/or his company introduced kits for the same substances under a different brand name—kits that bear a strong resemblance to our QTests.”
“After extended discussions and unmet expectations, we made a business decision to open our own webshop for North America to pursue independent marketing and distribution efforts,” a Miraculix spokesperson told Filter. “Emanuel continued as a distributor, maintaining whitelabel use of the QTest name.”
“We communicated that continued use of the QTest branding under a separate sales channel was causing confusion among users and organizations,” the spokesperson continued. “We communicated that the whitelabel and QTests.org website would be phased out over a six-month period. Emanuel was invited to remain a standard Miraculix distributor (without whitelabel) under the same model used by other US partners.”
“It was therefore highly concerning to us when Mr. Sferios and/or his company suddenly introduced kits for the same substances under a different brand name—kits that bear a strong resemblance to our QTests in both packaging and methodology,” the spokesperson continued. “His assertion that these kits were developed entirely independently and ‘have nothing to do with Miraculix’ contradicts both his own previously documented statements and the substantial research effort required to develop such tools.”
Miraculix says it became aware in May of Sferios’ launch of PurityTestkits.com, “despite … the lack of any agreement to replicate or independently develop such products.”
“The NDA had nothing to do with their MDMA, LSD and psilocybin kits,” Sferios told Filter. “Those kits were already publicly available.”
“Our collaboration with Mr. Sferios was built on mutual understanding and formalized through a non-disclosure agreement (NDA),” the spokesperson said. “Over a period of more than two years, we provided him with our quantitative test kits for MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin—kits that were developed through extensive research and validated in real-world harm reduction settings. Prior to our work, kits of this quality, capable of quantifying the actual amount of the target substance, were not available on the market.”
But according to Sferios, the NDA is irrelevant.
“The NDA had nothing to do with their MDMA, LSD and psilocybin kits,” he told Filter. “Those kits were already publicly available. The NDA itself states that those kits are not confidential information. The only confidential information they gave me (that I was not allowed to reverse-engineer) were the fentanyl test kit prototypes they sent me.”
Photograph of MDMA pills (cropped) by tanjila ahmed via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0
