Drug Checking at Festivals

Drug checking services test what is actually in a sample and tell the person who brought it, without judgment and without police. Reagent chemistry, mass spectrometry or immunoassay strips, depending on the service. You do not have to guess what is in your pills.

The research on whether this changes behaviour is consistent in direction and worth reading carefully, because the strongest studies were done in a population that is not you.

What the evidence shows, and in whom

Peiper and colleagues, 2019. Writing in the International Journal of Drug Policy, they studied fentanyl test strip use among 125 people at a North Carolina syringe services program. 63% of samples came back positive. In multivariable models, people who got a positive result had five times the odds of reporting they changed how they used: going slower, using less, switching route.

Krieger and colleagues, 2018. Same journal, prospective design, and the finding that makes the first one usable: 92% said the strips were easy to use and 88% would use them again. A test people find awkward or humiliating does not get used, so acceptability is not a soft outcome.

Foulds and colleagues, 2022. Their systematic review in the Harm Reduction Journal pooled 14 evaluations of drug checking services and found the same pattern throughout: clients change behaviour on an unexpected result, and the services double as real-time surveillance of what is circulating locally.

Read the population carefully. Peiper and Krieger both enrolled people who inject drugs, not festival attendees. The effect is large and the direction is not in doubt, but it was measured in a different group than this page is written for. No controlled data exists showing that drug checking reduces population-level overdose mortality. That evidence has not been produced yet, and saying otherwise would be overselling a tool that is worth using on its own merits.

What is turning up in the supply

The idea that fentanyl is a heroin problem is out of date.

Pressed pills are the sharpest case. A 2022 DEA public safety alert reported that 6 of every 10 counterfeit pressed pills seized nationally contained a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. That is directly relevant to festival supply, where almost nothing arrives from a pharmacy.

Stimulants and entactogens are not exempt. DanceSafe’s checking program has confirmed fentanyl in samples submitted as MDMA, cocaine, ketamine and pressed pills across multiple US regions, with rates varying substantially by geography.

We are not going to quote you a contamination percentage. Rates swing enormously by region, by year and by which service collected the samples, and a national-sounding figure would misrepresent all three. British Columbia’s CDC publishes an ongoing drug checking dashboard showing fentanyl and its analogues in samples sold as stimulants; check current local figures there rather than trusting a number quoted second-hand, including from us.

Sometimes the drug is simply absent. The Loop’s on-site mass spectrometry in the UK has repeatedly found samples sold as MDMA that contained no MDMA at all: methamphetamine, cathinones, novel psychoactive substances, or something else entirely.

So this is not an opioid-user issue. It applies to anyone holding a pill, powder or crystal that did not come from a pharmacy.

The services, and what each can actually see

DanceSafe, United States. Booths at festivals and events offering fentanyl test strips with instructions, reagent kits for substance identification, harm reduction supplies, and people who will talk you through a result. Most events do not have mass spectrometry on site, so detection is limited to reagent color reactions plus strips. That combination is useful and it is not the same as a lab. Their event schedule is at dancesafe.org.

The Loop, United Kingdom. The Loop pioneered on-site mass spectrometry at festivals and has expanded across Europe. Full multi-drug testing, a one-to-one consultation with a harm reduction worker to go through what came back, and formal agreements with organizers including police non-enforcement protocols at participating events. They have issued real-time warnings to an entire festival when a dangerous batch surfaced. The catch is structural: you get this only if the festival contracted for it.

Know Your Stuff, New Zealand. Running since 2015, and since the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Act 2021 operating under the first explicit legal authorization of drug checking anywhere. They use FTIR spectrometry, find that roughly 10% of submitted substances contain something unexpected, and report that around 78% of people who get an unexpected result choose not to use it. That last figure is the best behavioural outcome data available, because it comes from a consistent methodology run over years.

On legality: in most US states drug checking services are legal, though the status of fentanyl test strips specifically still varies state to state. The UK and New Zealand arrangements are described above.

What no checking method can do

It cannot call a sample safe. It can report that specific compounds were or were not detected. Those are different sentences.

It cannot solve the hotspot problem. Fentanyl is often unevenly distributed through a batch. A negative on the portion you tested says nothing definitive about the rest.

It cannot catch every analogue. Some novel fentanyl analogues are not picked up by standard BTNX strips, and untargeted mass spectrometry, while far more complete, is still not everything.

It cannot tell you dose or purity. Presence is not quantity, and a correctly identified sample can still be far stronger than the last one.

Strips themselves have measurable error. In a head-to-head validation against street-acquired samples, fentanyl test strips came out best of the three devices tested, with a 3.7% false negative rate and a 9.6% false positive rate, correctly identifying acetyl fentanyl and furanyl fentanyl. Read the second number too: roughly one positive in ten was not fentanyl. A negative result on your MDMA lowers your risk. It does not clear it.

If there is no service where you are

Fentanyl test strips are the most accessible option. Dissolve a small amount in water, and get the volume right, since it varies by drug and too little water causes false positives. Our fentanyl test strip guide has the ratios. Dip for 15 seconds, lay the strip flat, read at 2 to 5 minutes.

One line means POSITIVE, fentanyl detected. Two lines means NEGATIVE, none detected. That reads backwards to almost everyone the first time, and misreading it is the most common failure with these strips.

Reagent kits answer the other question. Marquis, Mecke and Simon’s give color reactions that identify whether you are holding MDMA, an amphetamine, ketamine, 2C-B and so on. They catch gross misrepresentation, meaning no MDMA in your MDMA, and they will not detect fentanyl at contamination levels. The two tests are not substitutes for each other.

Carry both. Our test kits page lists what is stocked where.

Sources

• Fentanyl test strips as an opioid overdose prevention strategy: findings from a syringe services program in the southeastern United States. International Journal of Drug Policy, 2019. PMID 30292493
• Use of rapid fentanyl test strips among young adults who use drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy, 2018. PMID 30344005
• An assessment of the limits of detection, sensitivity and specificity of three devices for public health-based drug checking. International Journal of Drug Policy, 2020. PMID 31951925
• Foulds and colleagues, systematic review of drug checking service evaluations. Harm Reduction Journal, 2022.