It's official, North America's most advanced party drug testing setup is now open for business.
In the middle of an opioid overdose epidemic that has already killed hundreds of people in British Columbia this year, Shambhala electronic music festival's harm reduction team can finally say it's testing for trace amounts of opioids like fentanyl. That's thanks to new spectrometer technology brought in by ANKORS, the organization that has been offering low-tech pill tests at the event for more than a decade.
When I called up Chloe Sage, who's heading up ANKORS's drug testing department this year, she told VICE the line to check pills was already 200 people deep Thursday afternoon. Concern about deadly synthetic opioids has reached an all-time high, said Sage, so a good chunk of the festival's 15,000 attendees don't mind waiting to test their party supplies in up to four different ways.
"When they get to the front of the line, we have someone go over the disclaimer with each person," Sage told VICE. Some festivals have had their insurance pulled just for offering drug testing, so Shambhala's disclaimer acknowledges the limitations of the tests and places responsibility with the user. ANKORS also asks for a bit of information for research purposes: what it was sold as, if it was purchased on festival grounds—"nothing personal," says Sage.
Shambhala has always had an open, non-judgmental policy about experimental drug use, which you can see as soon as you arrive. Each stage is its own other-worldly set piece, and campers tend to plan elaborate costumes weeks and months ahead of time—all basically in effort to trip people out. So it's oddly fitting that the festival's newest additions to the drug testing game seem straight out of sci-fi.
