Testing party drugs for purity saves lives… There is no question about it

And while I was not really into party drugs in my younger years, I did try ecstasy pills twice, cocaine 3 times and Ritalin (which they give to little boys in high school for ADHD) several times.

I live in Australia and as far as the quality for party drugs goes here, we have the WORST drugs in the world.

After experimenting with these party drugs, I realized that this is something not for me given how risky taking party drugs can be. The risk comes from dirty pills and cut powders which often have toxic ingredients to dilute the original drug for profit or simply because the original drug was poorly prepared using poor quality chemicals or cheaper substitutes.

What often is sold as pure MDMA or cocaine has often less than 20% of the actual drug. The other 80% of the ingredients can be toxic and deadly chemicals which are able to kill the user within a short period of time.

The latest research in the US has exposed the huge variations in the MDMA content of ecstasy pills internationally, with European party-goers having access to the purest pills and other party drugs – and Australians having the worst quality recreational drugs.

The party drugs research by drug rehabilitation service American Addiction Centers (AAC), will call for widespread festival drug testing, revealing that ecstasy pills in Europe contain, on average, 67.1% MDMA, compared to 16% in the lowest-ranked territory, Australia. This is really frightening times for Australian youth who engage in drug taking. The Australian government and police are turning a blind eye to drug taking safety, which is appalling.

The average ecstasy pill that was tested in North America came up at 54.2% MDMA – this number drops to 35% in the US specifically and a really low 25% in Canada. In Asian countries, it tested at 52.9% MDMA, and in Oceania as a whole at a relative 47.3%. It seems that Australia and Canada are at risk of being flooded with potentially toxic and fake MDMA and ecstasy pills. This can cause a lot of suffering for party goers and even death.  

Dirty ecstasy pills and other tainted and impure drugs sold at various music festivals have been blamed for many deaths, including those at Time Warp in Argentina, Closeup Forever Summer in the Philippines and Stereosonic in Melbourne, Australia (where promoter Richie McNeill slammed party goers for needlessly “poisoning themselves with these cheap, shitty drugs”).

Young people will always experiment with party drugs, whether they are legal or illegal. The best possible solution is pill and powder testing for the purity in these drugs – where party-goers can submit drugs for purity testing to see what’s exactly is in their pills and powders before ingesting. This is already a common practice in the Netherlands, Austria and Spain, and has recently found support from several UK events. Basically the message is clear, if you are partying with recreational party drugs, you should be testing these substances for health and safety.

And while Europe is doing the right thing by protecting the health and lives of their party goers, some countries are rather slow in that progress. Pill testing has also been suggested in Australia, the authorities and law enforcement there have been short of refusing to allow this practice. Australian policy makers imply that allowing for open party drug testing sends a message that “it’s OK to take drugs in public spaces”. This is despite AAC’s data suggesting Australians are most at risk from adulterated ecstasy and MDMA pills, not to mention how cut many other street drugs are such as cocaine.

What is also disturbing is that drug users have become so used to ingesting poor quality drugs in Australia, which means they are at risk of overdose or death when they take the same amount of pure MDMA or cocaine; for example, of the type growing in prevalence in Europe.

AAC made up its mind, which can be read in full here, by analysing data from more than 25,700 records taken between 2005 and 2017 from a popular website PillReports.net.

AAC sends a clear warning that without a way to test the purity of party drugs and various pills, “people have no way of knowing what they are ingesting. New chemical components are being laced with these drugs every year, and the results can be fatal.”

Kendal Calling, one of the UK festivals to invite drugs charity The Loop to facilitate pill testing – properly ‘multi-agency safety testing’ (MAST) – in 2016, repeated the party drug testing at this summer’s festival, finding a range of chemicals and substances from concrete, malaria medication to insecticide in pills submitted for analysis.

Drug analysis for cocaine showed that the drug is laced with laxatives, caffeine, creatine, and laundry detergents. Sometimes boric acid is used for cutting cocaine, as are local anaesthetics and cattle de-worming drug, levamisole.   

While I think that people who take drugs are gambling with their lives, this article is all about harm reduction. If people want to take party drugs (and many do) then they should have easy access to cheap and effective pill and powder testing kits. These drug testing kits will show you exactly what is in your drugs before you ingest them.

Your friend,

Alex

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