Dr. Paige Lemen is a recent PhD graduate in biomedical sciences at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and co-founder of 901 Harm Reduction, a Memphis-based group providing supplies and resources. She was arrested while transporting a 0.7-gram drug sample for laboratory testing, and now faces a series of charges—including possession with intent to sell, possession of drugs not prescribed, and driving under the influence of a controlled substance. The charges have troubling implications for future harm reduction work.

The arrest occurred on June 3 in Jackson, Tennessee, a small city near Memphis. Minutes earlier, Lemen had picked up the small drug sample for lab testing, something she had routinely done before. She believed at the time that the powdered sample was most likely to contain fentanyl.

Lemen reports that police began tailing her almost immediately after she picked up the sample.

While driving home, she experienced a sudden wave of nausea, a symptom she explained is linked to long-term complications from an Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection in 2017. Reaching for a box of crackers she keeps in her car to manage nausea, she briefly drifted over the white line twice.

“It’s very clear they don’t understand anything about drugs—they just immediately see something and then arrest you.”

A Jackson police officer immediately pulled her over for a field sobriety test, which she failed due to her inability to stand on one leg. The police report states that she declined a breathalyzer, urine test and blood draw. But Lemen insists that the brief field sobriety test was the only assessment she was offered prior to her arrest.

Additional officers searched her vehicle without her consent and seized several items linked to her harm reduction outreach and laboratory research, including the drug sample (which the police reported as fentanyl), diluted oxycodone solution for animal studies, rodent-sized syringes and other lab tools, as well as several medications she had been prescribed to manage her EBV complications.

Lemen said she repeatedly explained things to the officers, but that they laughed off her explanation, refusing to take her credentials seriously or ask for any supporting documentation.

“All of my training and credentials are very specific and detailed,” Lemen told Filter, listing off multiple forms of documentation, including from the university and her lab. “It’s very clear they don’t understand anything about drugs—they just immediately see something and then arrest you, and that’s about it.”

Dr. Paige Lemen. Photograph via 901 Harm Reduction/Facebook

According to Lemen, bodycam footage—which was released to her legal team but is not available for public viewing—shows that the police mocked her, celebrating the arrest as if they were “heroes.”

Lemen spent two nights in jail, where she slept on a mattress on the floor as the fifth woman in a four-person cell.

“They’re like, congratulating each other … and talking shit behind my back,” she said. “Like, ‘Look, check her for track marks!’ and stuff.”

Beyond this stigmatizing and unprofessional behavior, additional details raise red flags about potential police misconduct. When pulled over, Lemen openly acknowledged taking promethazine, a prescribed anti-nausea medication that is not a controlled substance. The officer insisted that constituted “driving on a controlled substance” and recorded it as such in his report. This is one of the three charges that Lemen is now facing in court.

The police report also claimed that one vial of her laboratory-grade diluted oxycodone solution tested positive for cocaine, a substance Lemen said she has never handled in her research or personal life. She questioned the accuracy of the field test, noting their known unreliability and the lack of a subsequent confirmatory analysis.

The Jackson Police Department did not respond to Filter’s request for comment on the accuracy of Dr. Lemen’s account.

“The entire rest of June, beginning of July, nobody was able to get supplies from us … People didn’t feel comfortable ‘cause there were police surrounding us … very clearly surveilling us.”

Lemen spent two nights in jail, where she slept on a mattress on the floor as the fifth woman in a four-person cell. Nurses refused to provide her the medications needed to manage her chronic illness. She was released on the evening of June 5 after a local harm reduction organization, DeCarcerate Memphis, paid her $10,000 bond.

Despite the personal costs of her arrest, Lemen is most concerned about its effects on her community. Heightened police surveillance at events has inhibited 901 Harm Reduction’s outreach work, she said, and several clients have reported being harassed by the police about whether Lemen had “sold them drugs.”

“The entire rest of June, beginning of July, nobody was able to get supplies from us at all,” she said. “People didn’t feel comfortable coming up ‘cause there were constantly security and police surrounding us … very clearly surveilling us.”

Photograph via 901 Harm Reduction/Facebook

Lemen said she has also observed unmarked police cars regularly parking near her home and taking photos of her property since her arrest.

In addition to the impacts on the immediate community, the case will likely set a precedent for how judges in Tennessee, and possibly far beyond, deal with future cases involving drug checking.

“Drug checking has those really gray-area laws, similar to syringe service programs,” Lemen explained. Even where it’s legal to operate registered drug checking programs, “There’s still those gray areas … What about the people working there bringing supplies in their car, and what happens if they get pulled over while they’re on the way?”

In advance of her court hearing, Lemen plans to continue gathering documentation that will prove her authorization to possess the confiscated supplies.

These legal gray areas worry harm reduction practitioners, who have consistently advocated for policy reforms that explicitly permit drug checking, syringe programs, naloxone distribution and other harm reduction interventions. Lemen’s arrest suggests that their fears are well-founded, and she’s acutely aware of the importance of her case.

“That’s gonna make me, like, probably the first person in Tennessee to get charged with drug checking,” she said. “If the only case to go off of is my case … that means they’re probably just gonna revert to my case outcome.”

In advance of her September 16 court hearing, Lemen plans to continue gathering documentation that will prove her authorization to possess the confiscated supplies. She is also searching for legal allies who understand laboratory research and drug checking and can articulate their legality to the judge.

She hopes that her case can make a positive impact, but she worries that even with the appropriate documentation, the judge will be unwilling to hear her perspective.

“People just don’t understand anything and aren’t willing to try,” she said.

Top photograph via Pickpik

The post Tennessee Harm Reductionist Faces Charges for Drug Checking appeared first on Filter.

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 

The post Fight Over Claimed Ownership of Drug-Checking Technology appeared first on Filter.

Alan Robinson, founder of cannabis brand Herbal Aspect and former executive director of WI NORML, would be the director of the proposed Narcotics Outreach Chemical Analysis Program (NOCAP). But after initially signaling interest in the idea, the local health department backed away due to what Robinson characterized as uncertainty around the legality of operating such a program.

“There is a fair amount of support,” Robinson told Filter. “We [also] have folks who don’t want to see crime go up in their neighborhoods as a result … that’s a nuanced conversation that involves educating individuals about how these harm reduction services reduce crime.”

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) signed legislation decriminalizing fentanyl test strips in 2022, followed by xylazine test strips in 2024. Both were previously categorized as drug paraphernalia. These test strips cost about $1 and are among the free supplies commonly distributed by syringe service programs, but they only produce binary results as to whether or not a sample contains any fentanyl (including fentanyl analogs) or xylazine. They can’t indicate whether any other substances are present, nor anything about the amount of fentanyl or xylazine present.

“Fentanyl, that was the first wave. Since then we have xylazine, medetomidine and BPS plastic in a lot of the drug supply,” Skye Boughman, clinical director and founder of the harm reduction organization CAYA Clinic, told Filter. “Nobody knows what they’re using anymore. Once we have that information … we can share that out with the entire community.” (CAYA Clinic is not affiliated with NOCAP.)

Forensic drug-checking technology can provide a wealth information that test strips cannot, but hasn’t yet been decriminalized. As with other programs around the country in similar legal gray areas, NOCAP needs buy-in from local officials who agree to let it operate without prosecuting organizers or participants.

NOCAP would have its own Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, a small machine that a trained technician can use to analyze drug samples and identify what substances are in them. These are the same machines used at overdose prevention centers and other government-authorized drug-checking programs. These analyses don’t require large samples in order to yield accurate results, and can generally be conducted with only residue.

“Someone’s not going to come in with a bag full of drugs,” Boughman said. “They will bring in the baggie it came in.”

FTIR analyses take only minutes, and program participants are able to have an interactive discussion with the technician about the results and what they mean. This method can be used to identify any known substance, as well as give a general impression of how much of that substance is present. NOCAP already has a technician attached to the project. The program would also have access to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS), which which is used for samples that call for a more detailed analysis.

“One of the big trends we’ve seen is the number of middle-aged Black and Brown men who are stimulant users,” Boughman said, “but then fentanyl and sedatives were introduced into the supply, and they have no tolerance. We’ve lost a lot of Black and Brown men in this area. The number of Indigenous deaths in Wisconsin continues to go up, and it is heartbreaking.”

The plan is for NOCAP to operate out of a standalone facility, but organizers don’t yet know where that would be. Robinson, who also sits on the county overdose fatality review committee, said they’re scouting locations.

Funding is also a barrier. Robinson said that there are ongoing discussions with the Dane County Board of Supervisors about potentially allocating a portion of opioid settlement payouts for NOCAP, but it’s not yet clear whether this will happen.

Another potential funder is Vital Strategies, a health nonprofit that’s previously supported harm reduction initiatives, including in Wisconsin, but nothing has been finalized there either. Adrienne Hurst, senior technical advisor for Vital Strategies’ Overdose Prevention Program, told Filter that the nonprofit is “exploring the possibility” of supporting NOCAP.

Currently there’s no concrete timeline for moving the program forward.

Images via New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene drug-checking team

The post WI Advocates Trying to Open State’s First Public Drug-Checking Service appeared first on Filter.

A study recently published in the Harm Reduction Journal investigated how many music festival attendees leverage these tools and what barriers they face. The authors surveyed 227 people at the Sonic Bloom Festival, a four-day EDM event held in Colorado, about their experiences with drug-checking strips and kits. 

Among those surveyed, 75 percent reported having used reagent test kits, while 66 percent had used fentanyl test strips. A majority indicated that they test “always” or “most of the time” before using substances.

“I think it speaks to this being a really empowering tool for people,” lead author Cianna Piercey, of Colorado State University, told Filter.

These encouraging findings demonstrate the growing normalization of drug checking at music festivals—helping people to know what’s in their substances, and to make informed decisions to protect themselves. But a variety of obstacles prevent many people from taking full advantage of these tools.

“Access is still really difficult for people.”

One major barrier to access in the United States is the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002, commonly known as the RAVE Act, which was designed to hold nightclub venue owners responsible for drug use at their events. The act discourages many EDM event organizers in the US from providing drug-checking services on-site.

Numerous countries have better policy landscapes for festival drug checking. In 2021, New Zealand became the first to permanently and explicitly legalize it—but such services had already operated for years in many other places, too, with differing levels of official or tacit permission.  

Though there are exceptions in the US, limited support for drug-checking services on-site at music festivals and concerts means that attendees are typically left to their own devices.

“People often have to rely on checking their own drugs or relying on friends to check drugs for them,” Piercey said. “Access is still really difficult for people.”

According to many Sonic Bloom attendees, the lack of institutional support for drug checking at music festivals creates a lot of problems. From sourcing and purchasing test kits, to traveling with potentially criminalized “drug paraphernalia,” to properly using the tools under stressful conditions, festival goers faced roadblocks every step of the way. Several reported that they could not afford to purchase their own test kits. Others feared the risks of flying with drug-checking supplies, given that they are criminalized in many states. 

Piercey noted that these results were especially startling given Colorado’s relatively permissive policy landscape. For festivals in other locations, sourcing test strips and kits could be even more challenging. 

“People are basically trying to perform like a little science experiment, right? And they’re outside. If it’s super-windy, they might lose their entire sample.”

“In Denver, there’s a storefront that actually sells reagent test kits. That’s not very common,” she said. “People normally would have to order reagents online ahead of time … and that in and of itself is a huge barrier.”

Even Sonic Bloom attendees who were able to successfully bring their own drug-checking supplies struggled to use them. Heat, wind, rain and other challenging weather conditions presented obstacles to proper use.

“People are basically trying to perform like a little science experiment, right? And they’re outside,” Piercey explained. “If they’re testing a powder, for example, if it’s super-windy, they might lose their entire sample.”

A particular challenge with reagents is that they must be kept cool to maintain their effectiveness, and can degrade quickly without refrigeration. Ice at music festivals is often prohibitively expensive, if it’s even available at all, increasing the risk that reagent tests won’t be effective. 

Some simple solutions include explicitly allowing attendees to bring their own drug-checking supplies.

Based on the results of their survey, the authors suggest several ways that music festivals can reduce barriers to personal drug checking. Some simple solutions include explicitly allowing attendees to bring their own drug-checking supplies, providing on-site training sessions that demonstrate how to use these tools, and creating weather-shielded spaces for testing.

Where legally possible, more festivals could also partner with harm reduction organizations to offer free or sliding-scale drug-checking services. This would help ensure that all attendees, regardless of their budget or travel constraints, have access to on-site supplies and expert guidance. 

While these interventions could help music festivals create a safer space for substance use, they don’t solve the deeper issue of the structural conditions that necessitate drug checking in the first place.

“All of this wouldn’t be necessary if people knew what was in the substances that they’re consuming to begin with,” Piercey said, “instead of having to perform a science experiment every time that they want to take a substance.” 

Photograph by Vinicius Garcia via Pexels

The post Music Festival Attendees Embrace DIY Drug Checking Despite Barriers appeared first on Filter.

But New York City wasn’t too far away, and so by the second semester of my freshman year, I was driving down every weekend and hitting as many clubs as I could. My first year of college also happened to be my last year of college. 

Pretty soon I started selling the nightlife drugs I was using, in order to afford going out that much. By that fall, when classes started up again for what would have been my sophomore year, I was full-on wheeling and dealing. Liquid acid, paper acid, acid gel tabs, ketamine, mescaline microdots. And ecstasy pills.

Ecstasy, or MDMA, all came from the Netherlands in those days. The pure “molly” that you’d hear whispers of—the kind that smells like sassafras, that’s been synthesized properly and will blow any pressed pill you’ve ever taken out of the water—was already over by 1998. But for a short time the pressed MDMA pills were still quality.

There were blue dolphins. Green RNs. Speckled crowns. There were so many kinds of the Mitsubishi-stamp pills it was getting out of hand. Mitsubishi GTs. Mitsubishi GT turbos. Double-stacked Mitsubishi GT turbos. Triple-stacked Mitsubishi GT turbos. They did stop after quadruple-stacked, since most people don’t actually want a pill that’s approaching the dimensions of a Big Mac. 

Everything was advertised as MDMA, but often you’d end up with MDA, or MDEA, or some other amphetamine derivative. There were two kinds in particular—Yellow Sunshines, and the Skull and Crossbones—that were outrageously speedy; one pill could keep you up for three days, reminiscent of a different well-known amphetamine.

Often I distinguished MDMA from the speedier, more hallucinogenic MDA by just taking a pill and figuring the rest of that batch was the same. But for sales purposes I needed something a bit more reliable, because once I started picking up 1,000-packs there were way too many different stamps and color and shapes. I didn’t want to sell something if I couldn’t even tell the buyer what it was.

We’ve just released what is effectively an all-new reagent instruction pamphlet, as well as a fully redesigned heatstroke pamphlet! More info on our website, in the most recent article posted. pic.twitter.com/uKpJ2VLbTv

— DanceSafe (@DanceSafe) May 1, 2024

Nightlife harm reduction nonprofit DanceSafe had just been founded in 1998, and when they started selling drug-testing reagent kits I was all in. When the chemical reagents interact with different drug samples they change to different colors, which you then cross-reference with a corresponding color chart. This gave me a sense of whether a pill was MDMA-based or MDA-based, and allowed me to share the info with people who were buying.

Reagent testing wasn’t something most people were doing, but I wasn’t the only one; people who were really serious about MDMA, whether for personal use or for business purposes, were ordering the kits too. The results didn’t indicate anything about potency, but were still helpful in determining how much to take because we knew MDA was more potent than MDMA.

According to my test results at least, MDMA was fading away while more pills seemed to comprise MDA and things that reagent testing couldn’t identify. And then around 2001, the market shifted toward ecstasy pills people began producing domestically.

The new supply was a lot cheaper than what we’d been getting from Amsterdam—around $1 to $3 per pill when you bought 1,000 at a time, whereas before it had been $7 or $9 per pill. But the quality went way down, to the point that I stopped using them. And because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable selling them anymore.

Image (cropped) via National Science Foundation

The post Props for Public Drug-Checking, From Someone Who Sold MDMA in the ’90s appeared first on Filter.

Many people who use drugs want to avoid xylazine. So several companies have seized the opportunity to develop xylazine test strips (XTS) which, mirroring fentanyl test strips, are designed to quickly and easily determine whether xylazine is present in a substance.

XTS are unregulated and were developed very quickly, leading many to question whether they can be trusted. A new study, published in the Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine, offers the first broad evaluation of seven commercial XTS products.

Reassuringly, all test strips reliably detected the presence of xylazine, even at very small doses and under extreme conditions. However, they also frequently produced false positives when exposed to a range of common drugs.

While the packaging of each XTS brand lists its sensitivity—the minimum xylazine dosage required to trigger a positive result—these performance claims are not always reviewed by third-party testers. The new study, whose authors report no financial ties to any XTS manufacturer, provides a much-needed quality check.

“We focused on evaluating if and how much they are different in performance from each other and if they are meeting the performance criteria or not,” coauthor Dr. Saman Majeed, of the University of North Carolina Asheville, told Filter.

These results demonstrate the trade-offs associated with selecting a brand of XTS. Some strips detected xylazine at incredibly small doses, but were also highly susceptible to producing false positives. 

The research team tested strips from seven vendors under a range of conditions, including extended storage at extreme temperatures. The vendors were 12 Panel Now, BTNX, DanceSafe (manufacturer WHPM), MD-Bio, Medimpex, WaiveDx and WiseBatch.

“The good thing is that they all give positive results for xylazine even after exposing [them] to all different conditions,” Majeed said. While all brands detected xylazine at low concentrations, 12 Panel Now was particularly sensitive.

However, the study uncovered a significant challenge: cross-reactivity. When exposed to substances such as lidocaine, methamphetamine, ketamine and Benadryl, many of the strips produced false positives. The degree of cross-reactivity varied widely among test-strip brands. The BTNX strips produced a false positive only for methamphetamine, while newer brands 12 PanelNow and Medimpex displayed cross-reactivity with almost every substance tested.

These results demonstrate the trade-offs associated with selecting a brand of XTS. For example, the 12 PanelNow strips detected xylazine at incredibly small doses, but were also highly susceptible to producing false positives. 

Table by Sydney Sauer, based on the study findings. “False positive” means that a false positive was produced at least once, out of several tests—but not necessarily every time.

When choosing between brands, consumers should look for strips that come with clear use instructions and have been rigorously tested and reviewed by independent researchers.

“There are many products out there that have not been independently, scientifically tested,” study coauthor Dr. Ju Nyeong Park, of Brown University, told Filter. “If I had to pick a brand, I would probably pick a brand that has been vetted at least once, if not multiple times, by different research groups.”

Currently, there is no centralized resource for checking which brands have been externally vetted, however.

“I would love to see the CDC or SAMHSA, or even the NIH, dedicate a website to this topic because clearly there’s a lot of need,” Park said. For now, she recommends contacting drug checking organizations like Street Check and Remedy Alliance for technical assistance.

“For me, the takeaway is that we still do need … more comprehensive models of drug checking programs.”

In addition to warning of the potential for false positives, the authors cautioned against taking negative results as evidence that a certain substance is safe for consumption. Just like fentanyl test strips, XTS lines can be faint and difficult to discern—especially in low-light environments like nightlife venues. And even when the result is clearly negative, the sample could still contain other substances that the person doesn’t want to ingest.

Due to these limitations, Park stressed the importance of continuing to develop full-scale drug checking services for community use.

“For me, the takeaway is that we still do need … more comprehensive models of drug checking programs,” she said. “I think that’s really important to highlight because any sort of test that you use in the community is more likely … to be less accurate than a lab.”

As a simple, portable option with relatively easy-to-interpret results, XTS are still a powerful harm reduction tool, considering their high detection rates in the lab. As more test strips and other portable testing options emerge, continued review by third-party experts will be essential.

“We really need a lot of performance evaluation studies, not only for xylazine test strips, but for all the drug testing strips in the market,” Majeed concluded.

Top photograph by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service via itoldya – GetArchive/Public Domain

The post Test Strips Do Tell You If Xylazine Is Present, But Prone to False Positives appeared first on Filter.

Inside, two chemists examine the powder through a microscope and advise me not to take all of the dose at once, since it is entirely pure. Naturally, I take heed.

The scene at the mobile drug checking facility seems futuristic, foreshadowing the common-sense drug approaches of tomorrow. A large screen outside of the prominently placed gazebo warns ravers about high-potency or adulterated drugs which have recently been in local circulation. A chart helpfully advertises which drugs are risky to use in combination with each other. A sign impresses the importance of set, setting and dose, and invites people to ask questions.

It’s soon easy to forget that compared to the norm in many places, this is a radical offering. Few other countries permit such services at festivals. In the United States, testing is only officially available at a few smaller festivals where promoters have decided to take legal risks. Despite a number of recent drug-related deaths, the larger festivals have yet to get on board.

This reluctance is substantially a consequence of the 2002 Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, a federal law introduced by then-Senator Joe Biden, which makes rave organizers criminally liable for drug use at their events. The law discourages promoters from providing harm reduction services, for fear of then being held liable for any harms related to participants’ use.

“By spending a few minutes getting your drugs tested, we can help you engineer a really great festival.”

Bass Coast, which primarily showcases underground DJs, began testing drugs in 2018 following consultations with local authorities. The move came after BC was rocked by drug-related deaths at Shambhala festival in Nelson, in 2012; at Boonstock festival in Penticton, in 2014; and at the Center of Gravity festival in Kelowna, in 2018.

Shambhala, which in 2024 hosted 20,000 people on its privately-owned land, initially offered unauthorized and unadvertised testing from 2004, delivered by the pioneering harm reduction organization ANKORS. This went public in 2015, and was authorized not long after.

But some other festivals in BC and elsewhere in Canada—despite the successes of groups like GRIP, who test at events in the east—have not been able to secure permissions locally, according to Bass Coast Harm Reduction Manager Stacey Forrester. That’s even though the BC government previously wrote to festival promoters, urging drug checking.

“We want you to have a good time at Bass Coast,” Forrester told Filter. “We don’t want you to have to spend your whole weekend in medical or in the sanctuary spot because you took something that wasn’t what you thought. By spending a few minutes getting your drugs tested and learning more about what it is and perhaps how potent it is, we can help you engineer a really great festival.”

The future of harm reduction, she added, is in “benefit maximization,” as the stigma around having a good time on drugs fades.

“It turned out to have no MDMA, and was just a mixture of fentanyl and caffeine.”

Nine times out of 10, the drugs tested at Bass Coast and Shambhala contained what was expected, according to analysis of the data collected from 2,700 participants last year. But when a bag supposedly containing MDMA is actually something else, or is of unexpectedly high strength, or cut with dangerous contaminants, festivalgoers who haven’t had their drugs checked can be in for heart palpitations, hospitalization or worse.

“Two years ago at a festival we had somebody with a drug they bought online that was supposed to be MDMA,” Antoine Marcheterre, the drug checking lead at BC’s interior health authority, told Filter. “It turned out to have no MDMA, and was just a mixture of fentanyl and caffeine.”

Marcheterre, who has worked with ANKORS to provide this service since 2017, noted that some people choose to bring fentanyl to festivals for their personal use, but that unintentional use by people without experience or opioid tolerance is significantly riskier.

In 2019, at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, a 26-year-old man died with MDMA and fentanyl in his system—a combination that he likely did not take on purpose. Somewhat eerily, harm reduction activists had staged a protest at the festival earlier that weekend to raise awareness around fentanyl test strips—which were considered illegal drug “paraphernalia” in the state (prior to 2022 reforms), and were thus banned at the event.

One of the greatest benefits of drug checking is that it effectively leads to an improved drug supply, Marcheterre said.

One of the greatest benefits of drug checking is that it effectively leads to an improved drug supply, Marcheterre said. Drugs purchased at Bass Coast and Shambhala are almost 10 percent more likely to test as expected than drugs procured prior to the events, the data showed.

“We are a very drug-illiterate culture,” Chloe Sage, the Shambhala festival drug checking team co-lead, told Filter. She helped set up the program two decades ago with ANKORS. “We’re creating a harm reduction culture where you teach people the tools to take care of each other, and themselves.” 

Festivalgoers have become vested in this culture, with attendees stumping up $20,000 for a 2018 GoFundMe campaign to enable the nonprofit to purchase a high-quality FTIR spectrometer testing device. Shambhala put up another $10,000; but that was exceptional, according to Sage.

“I’ve never [otherwise] heard of a festival actually putting money up for an organization to buy something like this with no strings attached,” she said. She pointed to corporate ownership of festivals as an obstacle to forward-thinking health policies.

“It’s a lot of work for us to convince promoters to let us provide our services,” Rae Elkasabany, the drug checking program coordinator at DanceSafe, a decentralized US harm reduction nonprofit, told Filter. Even when her organization succeeds in that, festivals may fail to properly advertise their services at the event and online. “They don’t want to get in trouble. It’s a high risk for them, because of our backwards laws.”

DanceSafe has conducted drug checking at festivals such as TomorrowWorld, Imagine, Mysteryland and Lightning in a Bottle. In 2015, however, during its fourth year at Electric Forest in Michigan, which was attended by around 40,000 people, event producers suddenly ordered the organization to close its booth, with no reason provided, it said at the time. DanceSafe was allegedly told to stop giving out an informational card about heroin because it was “too promotional.”

“Technically, we’re not allowed to say where we’re providing drug checking services,” Elkasabany said. “We operate in the legal gray area.” Times are changing, though slowly, she added.

In 2017, the Department of Justice clarified that providing drug education and free water is not a violation of the RAVE Act, while some states have permitted drug checking amid a US national toll of 300 drug-related deaths per day.

“There’s so many federal agencies using Burning Man as a training ground for their officers.”

Even in places which would be expected to be able to embrace drug checking, however, there can be challenges.

“There’s so many federal agencies using Burning Man as a training ground for their officers,” Taylor Wood, the drug checking program manager at the Chicago Recovery Alliance, told Filter. “The risk of getting arrested for possession is very high.”

In 2022, Wood and another team had planned to offer testing in a particular camp at the sprawling desert festival—but it got cold feet at the last minute. “We’ve had better success with underground raves and doing drug checking in those spaces,” he said.

Some activists therefore go renegade at festivals, conducting gonzo checking services with rudimentary testing equipment. Others are allowed to hand out fentanyl testing kits and naloxone at harm reduction booths—which are sometimes hidden away and not advertised.

While all of these measures help to reduce the risks of an unregulated supply, there is no panacea. “The complicated thing about drugs is that they’re just chemicals, but they’re chemicals that go inside people,” Macheterre said, “and people are complicated.”

Back at Bass Coast, the supreme high from the 2C-B is wearing off, and the advice not to take the entire dose has been vindicated. It might have been overwhelming.

All photographs by Mattha Busby

The post Festival Drug Checking Services Still Too Often Sidelined appeared first on Filter.

In Canada, there have been more recent reports of drugs showing up that will be unfamiliar to most. The media default is to try to scare people about any “new” substance. Risks shouldn’t be minimized, but at the same time, harm reductionists know that people aren’t just going to stop using based on these reports.

A legal, regulated, safe supply of drugs—so people know what they’re getting and how much of it—would be the best answer. In the absence of that, we should learn as much as we can about what’s out there, to try to keep ourselves and others aware and safe.

Two substances that have made news lately are protonitazepyne, found in Quebec City, and medetomidine (and/or dexmedetomidine), found in Toronto.

Protonitazepyne is a synthetic opioid from a class called benzimidazole-opioids, AKA nitazenes. These range in potency, but some sources estimate protonitazepyne (N-pyrrolidino protonitazene) to be roughly 25 times more potent than fentanyl—meaning you’d need one 25th of the quantity to get an equivalent effect.

Medetomidine is a tranquilizer which is approved only for veterinary use (like xylazine, which by now is more familiar in the supply). Its close relative dexmedetomidine is also approved for anesthesia or pain relief in humans; the two are so structurally similar that Toronto’s Drug Checking Service can’t distinguish between them, and classifies them together. It notes that the drugs “are considered to be more potent than xylazine (longer acting and produce greater sedation).”

These are just a couple of examples of substances showing up, including in counterfeit pharmaceuticals. There’s no way of knowing everything that’s out there, when chemical structures can easily be tweaked by those in the know, incentivized by profits and the need to avoid detection under prohibition.

McDonald described how her service initially found protonitazepyne in a sample of pills sold as oxy 80s.

Reaching out to people to interview for this article, I was made aware of a national Canadian drug checking working group. I was invited to join one of the meetings, co-hosted by the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addiction and the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use.

The meeting’s structured format covered updates from various drug checking programs coast-to-coast. When it opened up for questions, I was able to interview some of the members, adding to comments two of them had previously given.

Karen McDonald is the lead at Toronto’s Drug Checking Service at St. Michael’s Hospital, a site of Unity Health Toronto, and has been instrumental in advancing drug checking services in Canada. She described how her service initially found protonitazepyne on March 6, in a sample of pills sold as oxy 80s.

“The unregulated opioid supply is increasingly more contaminated and less predictable,” she told Filter. “This can largely be attributed to the Iron Law of Prohibition: As enforcement of substances intensifies, the strength of prohibited substances increases. Furthermore, as more substances are scheduled, novel substances take their place.”

She suggested an additional factor behind the emergence of more unfamiliar opioids: “‘New’ high-potency opioids may also be introduced to the unregulated supply to meet the needs (increased tolerances) of people who use drugs.”

It’s important to remember that not everyone who uses emerging drugs does so unwillingly or unknowingly. Fentanyl was once portrayed solely as an unwelcome adulterant, but some people—including me, not so long ago—have come to prefer it. Some of us also just like to experiment.

“We know little about its dose response curve, duration, side effects and interactions. Claims for protonitazepyne’s potency must be taken with nuance.”

Antoine Marcheterre is the drug checking lead at Interior Health, based out of British Columbia, and he stressed what we don’t yet know about protonitazepyne.

“Anytime a new substance appears on the market, it brings a new set of unknowns with it,” he told Filter. “In this case, we know very little about its dose response curve, duration of action, side effects and interactions.”

He also pointed out: “The claims for protonitazepyne’s potency are based on in vitro data, so must be taken with nuance.”

Doris Payer, senior knowledge broker at the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, based in Ottawa, Ontario, also referenced the inevitable effects of prohibition in driving the emergence of drugs like protonitazepyne.

“It’s probably in part because more potent drugs are easier to move and more cost-effective, in part because drug busts and crackdowns limit the supply of what people actually want, and in part because [the drugs in question] might produce effects that some people want,” she told Filter.

“Medetomidine may put those who use it in a deep state of unconsciousness, much like xylazine and benzodiazepine-related drugs.”

Turning to medetomidine/dexmedetomidine, McDonald said she believes drugs of this type are occurring in the supply principally due to their relative accessibility and their potential effects: They may give fentanyl more “legs,” making the effects of that short-acting drug last longer; they also carry risks.

“Medetomidine may put those who use it in a deep state of unconsciousness, much like xylazine and benzodiazepine-related drugs,” McDonald said. “The risk of extreme drowsiness and sedation is increased when medetomidine is used in combination with high-potency opioids, benzodiazepine-related drugs and xylazine.”

“This is noteworthy,” she continued, “because 100 percent of the samples checked by Toronto’s Drug Checking Service that contained medetomidine [also] contained at least one high-potency opioid. Many of these samples also contained a benzodiazepine-related drug or xylazine.”

Marcheterre agreed that one of the main reasons we’re seeing these drugs is because they’re fairly easy to acquire. They can be purchased on the regular internet, he noted, by people who search the chemical identification numbers and look up various vendors. If shipments are seized, vendors will often resend them, reducing the risks and hassle of online shopping.

“I can only speak to what we observe locally. We have seen nitazenes in pills that are sold as opioids, replacing oxycodone or hydromorphone for example.”

Kathryn Balind, who works at GRIP (Groupe de Recherche et d’Intervention Psychosociale) in Montréal, Quebec, described what she and her colleagues have been seeing. “I can only speak to what we observe locally,” she told Filter. “We have seen nitazenes in pills that are sold as opioids, replacing oxycodone or hydromorphone for example, or alone, as the desired substance.”

As for why it’s happening, she broadly agreed with the other experts: “I think the nitazenes are showing up in the supply as replacements for other desired substances, because perhaps they are easier to acquire and they are more potent, so less is needed in a pill.”

So how worried should we be? Clearly, there are serious potential risks associated with high-potency drugs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t potential benefits for some. But knowledge is everything.

“What is most worrisome about these drugs is that their presence is unexpected by people using them,” McDonald said. “How can someone attempt to use safely when they don’t even know they are using something?”

“Because protonitazepyne is so strong, the risk of overdose is increased,” she continued. “Even if folks were aware protonitazepyne was present in their drugs, it is highly unlikely they would know how much of it is present—a luxury we have with essentially anything [other than unregulated drugs] we put in our bodies.”

Payer agreed, noting how hard not knowing makes it for people “to prepare or protect themselves.”

But there are some important things we can do, as all the experts emphasized.

“Starting with a tiny amount first to test the waters could be the difference between waking up or not.”

These include carrying naloxone, the opioid-overdose reversal drug; never using alone if you can possibly avoid it; and doing a “tester” when you use a new batch—”Start low and go slow,” as the harm reduction saying has it.

“Starting with a tiny amount first to test the waters could be the difference between waking up or not,” Marcheterre said.

And of course, checking your drugs before you use them—if you have any chance to do that—is a crucial way to increase your safety.

“Drug checking services can help you determine what is in your drug before you choose to use it,” Marcheterre said. “This can be lifesaving in cases where you end up with a substance that was not expected.”

“The dosage in tablets may vary from one tablet to another,” he warned. So don’t just assume that because one was ok, the other will be too.

In terms of dealing with an emergency, the experts also recommended utilizing oxygen for overdoses that leave people extremely sedated, including in cases when naloxone has been administered first.

But none of these critical resources is a cure-all.

“The unregulated drug supply is unpredictable; we never know what could be in our drug, and we need to keep in mind that drug checking technologies have limits,” Balind said. “There are synthetic opioids circulating that are super-potent and hard to detect. There are adulterants circulating that are not meant for use in humans, and the side effects of repeated use are not well known.”

Regulation is the only way to truly transform this picture.

New or unfamiliar drugs are not going to stop appearing in our supply; without radical policy change, it will just keep happening.

“For nitazenes, this is the continuation of a trend where we see stronger and stronger analogues and families of substances entering the unregulated market,” Balind said. “The possibilities are almost infinite in terms of small modifications that can be made on known molecules, turning them into something else, which could be more potent and hard to identify with our current drug checking technologies.”

These experts are dedicated to spreading knowledge to keep people who use drugs safer, and we’re lucky to have them. But the mechanisms of prohibition ensure that the supply will keep shifting faster than anyone can keep up with, and that will continue to cost lives.

Regulation is the only way to truly transform this picture. People don’t want to die—and if they know the ingredients and dosage of what they’re using, they’ll overwhelmingly stay alive. When will we have governments that recognize this—rather than the futile goal of eliminating drug use—as the priority?

Image by Caroline Davis2010 via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

The post Protonitazepyne and Medetomidine? More Unfamiliar Drugs in Our Supply appeared first on Filter.

Even if the bills win legislative approval, however, they face an obstacle in Governor Phil Scott (R), who last year vetoed a pair of bills containing more limited drug policy reforms.

The new all-drug decriminalization legislation, H.423, from Representatives Logan Nicoll (D) and Taylor Small (P/D), boasts 47 cosponsors, nearly a third of the 150-member House. A companion bill on the Senate side, S.119, is sponsored by Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (P/D) and 10 others.

BREAKING: Bill to end criminalization of substance use in Vermont introduced in the House today (H.423) #vtpoli

(1/3) pic.twitter.com/NO2i1pi1Yy

— Decriminalize Vermont (@DecrimVermont) February 28, 2023

The proposal would replace Vermont’s current misdemeanor or low-level felony charges for simple drug possession, making the possession of “a personal use supply of drugs” a civil offense punishable by a $50 fine. People could get out of paying that penalty by agreeing to participate in a screening for substance use disorder, which would also connect them with other services.

The “dispensing” of amounts below the personal-use thresholds would similarly be subject to a $50 fine. Supporters said that’s intended to allow the sharing of small amounts of drugs.

Another provision would establish a pilot program to allow people to test their drugs.

Photograph via City of Burlington

This story was originally published by Marijuana Moment, which tracks the politics and policy of cannabis and drugs. Follow Marijuana Moment on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for its newsletter.

The post Vermont Has Multiple New Drug Decriminalization Bills appeared first on Filter.

On February 25, Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath (Labor Party) announced that the state will set up both brick-and-mortar and mobile testing sites. The health ministry hasn’t yet provided details about where these sites will be, but plans to find a provider to partner with.  

“Pill Testing is a harm reduction service where information and advice is provided to a person considering taking an illicit drug, encouraging choices that reduce overall drug use and the harms associated with taking illicit drugs,” D’Ath wrote on Twitter.  

Resources that enable people to find out what’s in their drugs are an established way of reducing harms.

She also warned that the service “does not take away from police powers related to offences of illicit drug possession, supply and trafficking which remain the same.” However, people will not be arrested or reported to police while using the service. 

Queensland, in northeastern Australia, is the country’s third most populous state, and includes the city of Brisbane. In 2020, 1,842 Australians lost their lives to overdose. Queensland has had fewer fatalities per capita than the country as a whole, but has still suffered over 200 deaths every year since 2007. Resources that enable people to find out what’s in their drugs—from fentanyl test strips to drug-checking services at music festivals—are an established way of reducing harms.

“Drug testers can also influence a drug taker’s behaviour, making them more likely to dispose of substances, decrease the amount they take, tell their peers and be more likely to seek help if they or others are experiencing adverse effects,” D’Ath said in a press release.

While Queensland is the first Australian state to take such a step, it follows—and was directly inspired by, according to D’Ath’s office—a successful drug-checking project in the capital city of Canberra. In July 2022, Pill Testing Australia (PTA) and Harm Reduction Australia launched a six-month pilot there, partnering with the Australian Capital Territory government (ACT). (PTA, a coalition of drug and health advocacy organizations, had earlier operated Australia’s first drug-checking service at a music festival, Groovin the Moo, in 2018.)

Described by VICE as the only site of its kind the country, the Canberra project tested hundreds of samples in its first six months. It used were fourier transform infra-red (FTIR) spectroscopy, ultra-performance liquid chromatography-photodiode array (UPLC-PDA), and fentanyl test strips. People brought in what they thought was ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin to be tested.

In 55 percent of “ketamine” samples, no ketamine was found.

According to PTA’s report, a large proportion of drugs were found to be adulterated—and often not to include any of the drug the person thought they’d purchased. In 55 percent of “ketamine” samples, no ketamine was found—instead, cutting agents, other drugs or even “unknown” substances were present. For both MDMA and meth, 27 percent of samples contained none of the expected drug. With cocaine it was 25 percent, and with heroin 14 percent.

The project also recorded participants’ responses, and a majority (61 pecent) said that if their drug was not what they thought it was, they definitely would not use it. It’s a finding that refutes the arugment of opponents that drug-checking services encourage drug use. 

The Canberra project has also been a gateway to education and support. Eighty percent of participants accepted some kind of drug or health “intervention,” including harm reduction education, and 30 people received naloxone, the opioid-overdose antidote. And the service has generally helped people to use drugs more safely: After receiving test results, people were more likely to use with a friend, keep naloxone handy, and not combine their drugs with other substances. The project is now being extended until at least July 2023. 

Another aspect of drug checking that Queensland hopes to harness is its ability to inform the wider public of what local drug supplies look like at any given moment. So if, for example, drug-checkers notice a trend of fentanyl being found in a certain type of pill available in certain places, they can send out alerts to people in that area. A similar idea informs projects such as the SOAR Initiative in Ohio.

Along with Canberra, Queensland will now be a leader on this issue in Australia. Other states, like Victoria and New South Wales, have yet to follow suit—despite the evidence.

“This is no longer an evidence or medical question,” PTA clinical lead and Calvary Hospital emergency consultant David Caldicott told the Guardian. “This is almost exclusively an ideological or political decision that has to be made.”

Internationally, there has been other recent progress. In 2021, New Zealand became the first country in the world to explicitly and permanently legalize drug-checking services. Switzerland also allows the services. And the Netherlands hosts a drug-checking service that’s believed to be the world’s oldest—with government funding, it serves tens of thousands of people each year, and issues national “Red Alerts” when high-risk supplies are detected. In countries such as Portugal, the Uited Kingodom and the United States, meanwhile, drug-checking services operate in a legal “gray area.”

Photograph via National Institute on Drug Abuse

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