Canada - Here’s How North America’s Most Advanced Festival Drug Testing Is Going...

[S.J.B.]

Here’s How North America’s Most Advanced Festival Drug Testing Is Going So Far
Sarah Berman
Vice
August 11th, 2017

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.

Read the full story here.

 

[Fresco]

I hope this spreads to our neighbours down south. Its all about harm reduction

 

[LucidSDreamr]

its very nice to hear of on site mass spectrometers being used, This is the only true way that has been done to quantify levels of varies drugs laced into the sample.

This service needs to be available everywhere that the heroin epidemic is going out of control, sadly when it comes to fent addicts I think a result of fent would just encourage them to use not discourage.

The only solution is having the government provide the manufactured drugs in a controlled fashion for users and provide more desirable heroin/oxy instead of fent.

ppl with no jobs whose communities are in shambles are not going to stop using drugs no matter what. People with chronic pain denied their meds due to the fent users that then have to turn to street fent are not going to stop and be in excruciating pain 24/7.

HR is really the only answer to this problem, but drug war ideology is so ingrained in american politics that I don't see it ever happening here and the deaths will just continue to climb until fent starts showing up in weed and the OD deaths start getting into the millions per year.