Behind the scenes at festivals all over the UK, drugs that are confiscated by security are tested in special pop-up labs to see what they contain. If they’re considered dangerous (they often are in an illegal market) a warning is put out to everyone there. Testing means those who take drugs can make safer choices from an informed place.
But without any notice before festival season – where, guess what, no matter what the law states, people will take drugs – the government has dropped in new requirements for a special license, which costs both money and time to obtain.
This new legislation meant that for the first time since 2014 drug testing wasn’t allowed to go ahead at Manchester’s Parklife. Drugs tests did take place at Glastonbury and back-of-house checking is planned to go ahead at Reading and Leeds festivals in August. However, Secret Garden Party (at the end of July) might not have time to apply for a license. It remains unclear what this will mean for the smaller festivals that rely on the support of charities.
A group of MPs, along with musicians Fatboy Slim and Olugbenga Adelekan of Metronomy, have united to write a letter to the UK's home secretary Suella Braverman urgently calling for this decision to be reversed, as it could risk lives.
Last summer, Alice Snape spent weeks investigating drug harm-prevention initiatives, speaking to charities, experts, politicians, police and those who have lost loved ones to drugs to see if there could be a safer future. We're republishing this feature (which first ran in the August/September issue 2022) in light of this news. All facts and figures remain as published at the time.
Her entire body is shaking, wobbling all over. She's like jelly. And everyone in this crowd of sweaty bodies will be able to tell – but she really hopes that they can’t. Especially security. They’ll chuck her out. She’s heard that you get barred for life if they find you in here with drugs. Or maybe she’ll get arrested. She thinks about the plastic baggies of powder tucked in her bra. But her body’s falling apart. She can’t stop it. She’s unravelling…
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‘Let’s get some water,’ says her friend, grabbing on to her arm. Suddenly, she’s back inside herself. Her mind was overwhelmed by sensations of violent convulsions but, in reality, externally, nothing was happening.
Looking back, Angel† says it felt like she was having ‘a seizure’. A 21-year-old student at the time, she’d taken some speed and MDMA that she’d bought on the dark web and had a few drinks. ‘I now see that my first thought should have been to get help,’ says Angel, now 23. ‘I shouldn’t have been worried about getting kicked out.’
But she was worried. Had her friend not taken her to a quiet place and encouraged her to drink water, things could have turned out very differently. When I told consultant addiction psychiatrist Dr Ben Watson about Angel, he said that, while he can’t confirm if she had a seizure, ‘illicit speed and MDMA could have caused dissociative experiences or psychotic symptoms’. And that, as Angel had taken a mixture of illicit drugs, she could have faced catastrophic harm.
Angel’s story can be read in different ways, twisted and repackaged depending on your views on drugs. The way I see it is that Angel should have felt able to seek help without the fear of getting into trouble. But is it any wonder she felt this way? Angel grew up with that same message you’re probably familiar with – drugs are bad. ‘Don’t do them,’ we’re told. But it isn’t always as simple as just saying ‘no’, regardless of the law or what we’re taught.
For centuries, drugs have existed, and, in a recent Cosmopolitan UK survey, 76% of those polled said they had taken an illegal drug at some point in their life. And, as we finally have a full line-up of festivals filling our summer – with the majority of our poll respondents saying they take drugs for fun and to party – it’s expected that, like it or not, there will be baggies being concealed to pass security.
It’s this that has experts concerned. But not in the way you might expect. For many, the worry is not the fact that people take drugs but how they take them, with fears that – due to higher strength drugs, a lower tolerance after multiple lockdowns and a stigma that stops people seeking help – there will be a rise in drug-related deaths at festivals this summer (at least 14 people under 25 have died after taking drugs at festivals in England since 2017).
Experts believe that these deaths – and future ones – could be prevented by an entirely different, more open attitude towards drugs. The problem? The fact that the government is doubling down on the prohibition model that’s been in place for the past 50 years – with even harsher punishments for people who take drugs recreationally. But is what amounts to a zero tolerance approach really best, or is there another more realistic way to ensure harm reduction? I set out to meet those on each side of the argument to find out...
I’m holding a pot of lollipops, shaking it occasionally, the sound of drum and bass reverberating through me from the speakers. They serve their purpose, attracting a raver in a fluorescent orange two-piece who rifles through the tub. We begin to chat in that smoking-area-of-a-club way that makes even casual conversations feel heightened.
‘Why are the yellow lollipops always picked last?’ I ask.
Her eyes, saucer-like, widen as she says, ‘Oh, everyone always hates the yellow ones.’
‘Try one,’ I say, holding it out.
She pops the lollipop in her mouth and grins. I decide to ask her my main question. What I’m here for.
‘What drugs have you taken today?’
At that, she scurries off, lost to the crowd of people and plumes of cigarette smoke.
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in March and I’m nestled in the corner of a nightclub in Bristol, a trestle table folded out in front of me holding a treasure trove of information that will be passed out to today’s ravers.
I’m here with Bristol Drugs Project’s The Drop, as part of its outreach work in the city. Aimed at those who take ‘party drugs’, such as MDMA, ketamine and cannabis, it advocates harm reduction (an approach it has taken since it launched in 1986), which – explains Sorcha Ryan, The Drop’s club and festival harm reduction lead – is a pragmatic approach to the fact that people take drugs, often in unsafe ways.
‘If you can put in place measures to minimise risks, that’s better than punishing people,’ she says. ‘People who take drugs don’t want to end up in hospital or ruin their night by being sick for hours. But a lack of education causes those things to happen.’
‘We have guidance on the maximum number of units of alcohol we should drink,’ Ryan continues, stressing that, although legal, alcohol is still a drug. ‘It’s normal in other aspects of life. Wear your seat belt. Don’t speed. These are all harm reduction strategies applied to other scenarios.’
For The Drop, harm reduction comes in the form of posters, leaflets and, well, us. It’s Ryan’s job, alongside service manager Shoba Ram and trained volunteer Lily (and today, me) to get people to engage with the information.
A poster shows what happens when you mix drugs together and, following the columns carefully with my finger, I find out that mixing alcohol and ketamine is dangerous. Then there are squares of paper that look like sticky notes, which can be rolled up and turned into snorting tubes that can be tucked away, ready to be used later, so no one has to share (sharing notes for snorting carries a risk of contracting hepatitis C). My mind flashes back to people at university passing round filthy rolled-up fivers and dipping dirty keys into baggies.
For an hour or so, the partygoers eye us up suspiciously. We try to speak to a few – such as Lollipop Girl – but lose them. Then, as the inhibitions drop, people tentatively approach. Some fill in The Drop’s anonymous survey; the data collected will allow them to know what drugs the ravers have taken. Others pick up snorting papers and walk off into the night.
Of course, I’ll never know how their nights turned out. That’s not the aim – we just hope that the pockets currently being filled with sticky notes are fragments of information that will filter into consciousness, planting a seed that will grow.
These are the sort of conversations that Fiona Measham, chair in criminology at the University of Liverpool, believes we need to have. She set up The Loop in 2012 to work behind the scenes in nightclubs and festivals. Along with conducting research, it set up camp – obtaining permission from the police – to test drugs in nightclubs, first at The Warehouse Project in Manchester in 2013. There, they tested confiscated substances in circulation on that night, putting out alerts if a dangerous substance was identified.
This testing facility became available to the public at festivals in 2016, and – at certain locations – you can take a sample of your drugs and get them tested by chemists in a pop-up lab before being told what’s in them (often – more on this later – drugs are cut with other more harmful substances). Based on this information, you’re offered advice from health professionals about the appropriate dosage or whether you should be taking the substance at all.
Some might think that services such as this will be seen as a green light to go wild, making them feel like drugs aren’t dangerous, and that they can take more. But this has been proven not to be the case. ‘Drug checking reduces drug use, it doesn’t increase it,’ explains Professor Measham. ‘We find that if the substance wasn’t what they expected, two-thirds hand it over for us to give to the police to destroy. Or if they find out the strength of the substance, over half will then take a lower dose.’ Since 2016, ‘there have been no drug-related deaths at any festival with drug checking’.
When I chat to Maggie Telfer, CEO of Bristol Drugs Project, on the phone a week after I visited Bristol, she points out that for most of the people I met there, drugs aren’t their life course – ‘they’ll move out of that phase’, she says. ‘They’ll have relationships, children, jobs – drugs become a part of their history. And we want everyone to be around to move through those experiences and get on with the rest of their lives.’
Eleanor Rowe was the sort of person who, according to her mum Wendy Teasdill, would ‘read the contents on the cat food packets’. In August 2013, at 18, she went to Boomtown with a friend – they were working as stewards for a charity. After their first shift before the festival had started, the pair drank a big can of lager and snorted a long line of ketamine in their tent. They both passed out.
When her friend woke up, Eleanor was dead beside her. Later, a coroner confirmed that it was the combination of ketamine and alcohol that killed her. If The Loop had been at Boomtown when Eleanor was there (it launched there in 2017), Wendy says, her voice catching, ‘she’d be alive today’. I imagine Eleanor looking at the chart inside the club in Bristol. Perhaps it would have made her stop and think before washing ketamine down with alcohol, the potent mix that killed her.
Elsewhere, three weeks before her death, Martha Mary Fernback tweeted, ‘It’s kinda scary how your whole life depends on how well you do as a teenager.’ The 15-year-old died on 20 July 2013 after she took 0.5g of MDMA that turned out to be 91% pure. ‘She took enough for five to 10 people in one go,’ says her mum Anne-Marie Cockburn, who is a campaigner for Anyone’s Child, a charity that believes in safer drug control.
When I ask what Martha was like, Anne-Marie replies, ‘It’s like asking what water tastes like, it’s such a familiar thing.’ Fiercely intelligent, Martha was ‘growing into herself’. Before she died, Anne-Marie had found out that Martha had tried ecstasy. When asked why, she’d said simply, ‘It makes me happy.’ Anne-Marie ‘barked’ back that it could be filled with poison.
‘After she died, I looked at her internet history – she’d searched how to take ecstasy safely,’ Anne-Marie says. ‘I wish I’d been braver, to go into the harm reduction territory that I’ve now realised is like telling someone to put on sunscreen.’
Like most teenagers, both Martha and Eleanor’s drugs education came from PSHE lessons at school – students are told how to recognise what drugs are, what class they are and that they could be mixed with harmful substances. But students aren’t taught how to take drugs safely. It’s assumed they won’t if they’re warned of the dangers. That assumption is, of course, often untrue. So, like Martha, they turn to friends or the internet – our survey found that 56% of those polled turn to mates, while 73% go online.
Here’s the thing, there are no ingredients lists on drugs or advice on how to take them, because they’re illegal and unregulated. And no one knows if that pill they’re about to swallow is what the dealer says it is. It could be laced with anything from cement to cleaning products.
Recently, drugs testers at a Manchester nightclub found a batch of ‘blue punisher’ ecstasy pills that were up to five times the usual strength. And on the first weekend clubs reopened last summer, a batch of ‘dangerously high-strength’ drugs in circulation in Bristol may have led to the death of one person and the hospitalisation of 20 others.
This is an ever-growing concern for David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist who specialises in drugs. He tells me that more potent variants keep emerging due to the unregulated market. MDMA, for example, is usually made from sassafras oil. ‘But underground chemists worked out how to make MDMA without sassafras oil, so they can make it for a quarter of the price with something that’s synthetically made, which means that some MDMA is now fourfold in strength,’ says Professor Nutt.
This goes to show why the advice passed down by Bristol Drugs Project – those seeds of awareness planted at places like that nightclub I was in – is so important. Information that seems simple, such as start low and take it slow. You should never swallow a whole pill at once, but break it into tiny pieces, wait, and see what happens before taking more. ‘Never take a second pill if the first doesn’t work,’ says Professor Nutt. This could be due to ingredients causing a delayed effect, or a different effect. The active ingredients can vary from pill to pill. ‘They look the same, but that doesn’t mean they are the same,’ says Bristol Drugs Project’s Shoba Ram.
It’s surreal seeing Kit Malthouse’s face flash up on Zoom. He’s the government’s Policing Minister and, clad in a navy suit and tie, he’s telling me about the Home Office’s ‘new’ 10-year drugs strategy, introduced in December 2021. There are towns and cities in the UK ravaged by addiction, and part of the government’s new plan is to get more people who are dependent on drugs into treatment. I understand that.
But what I don’t get is the new plan to punish recreational users – especially as I worry that harsher consequences (which includes the temporary removal of passports) will lead to more people being afraid to seek help if they need it. But Malthouse tells me that his proposed sanctions are to make people ‘think about their part in the drug supply chain’, which ‘involves murder, extortion, bribery and corruption’. Malthouse is putting the onus on drug users to change our current state of affairs. ‘Consumer power is what changes things,’ he says, likening people buying drugs in an illegal market to those who buy fast fashion. We all, he says, have to play our part in cutting off the cash source for dealers.
Yet other countries aren’t following this model. Many are opting for a lighter approach, one where those who take drugs feel able to seek support. This includes ending criminal sanctions for personal possession (but not if there’s a clear intent to supply), most notably led by Portugal, who decriminalised the consumption of all drugs in 2001. And 30 countries followed suit. Essentially, this means that drugs are treated more as a health issue than a criminal one. If you’re caught, it doesn’t result in imprisonment or a criminal record. Drugs are, however, still confiscated and possession may result in administrative penalties, such as fines or community service. Today, drug-related deaths in Portugal remain some of the lowest in Europe.
‘All while the UK is the drug death capital of Europe,’ exclaims Jane Slater, deputy chief executive officer at Transform Drug Policy Foundation. There were 4,561 deaths related to drug poisoning in England and Wales in 2020 – the eighth year in a row the figure has risen. In Scotland, there are 315 deaths per million among those aged 15 to 64 (over 50 times higher than Portuguese rates). And more women than ever before are dying for reasons related to cocaine in England and Wales, from 19 deaths in 2010 to 158 deaths in 2020 – a rise of more than 700%.
I pose Portugal’s model to Malthouse, asking why we’re not following it. ‘There’s not any safe way to take drugs,’ he asserts. ‘By legalising them or whatever, we think consumption would rise.’ In fact, the opposite appears to be true when we look at the data. In 2018, 5.3% of people aged 15 to 34 in the UK took cocaine compared with just 0.3% of 15 to 34-year-olds in Portugal in 2017.
And our survey proved just how vital drug checking could be, with 85% saying that they’d get their drugs tested if they could. Just 11% agreed with current laws, while 33% don’t understand them and 40% believe they’re too strict. Of course, we exist within the framework set up by our government. And while venues try to be safe, they have to conform to councils who are controlled by the government.
But at the time of writing, some exceptions are emerging, as The Loop and Bristol Drugs Project have been granted permission from the Home Office to open up the first regular drug-checking service in the UK. You can get your drugs checked in Bristol on the last weekend of every month at Bristol Drugs Project’s office in Brunswick Square.
What terrified me during my time with The Drop were stories of people being too scared of the ramifications to seek help if needed. Drug tests don’t provide guarantees but, surely, open conversations can only be a good thing. Hopefully when the information is out there, people stop, read it and decide if they want to take that pill. And if they do, they know the safest way possible.
Stay safe this summer
- Don’t feel the pressure: Don’t let mates pressure you into taking drugs. Remember, harm reduction is just that: reduction, not prevention. There’s never a guarantee that you’ll be totally safe.
- Get your drugs checked: The Loop will be in Bristol every payday Saturday, but will also be coming to other cities – find out more at wearetheloop.org. Don’t want to visit? Order a kit from reagent-tests.uk – they won’t test for strength, but they’ll tell you if a substance is what you think it is. Or, you could send a sample anonymously to wedinos.org.
- Don’t leave your mates: It’s easy to lose people at festivals. ‘Stay with friends – if something happens to one of you, the rest can look after them,’ says Professor Measham. ‘Take power packs to charge phones and arrange a meeting point every day at, say, 6pm, so you know where you’ll all be.’
- Set and setting: There’s more than just the drug to think about. How do you feel? Stress and tiredness can have an effect, as can the environment you’re in – is it too crowded? If you’re not in the right headspace, wait a bit and see how you feel later.
- Go slow, stay low: Follow advice from Bristol Drugs Project: only take a tiny bit first as a test, wait at least an hour, then see what effect you feel before you take anything else.
- Know your rights: Don’t let fear stop you from seeking support. Professor Nutt explains that people don’t seek help ‘because they’re frightened that they could be arrested, but in the UK, you can’t be convicted for having taken a drug’. You can, however, be convicted for possession or supply.
† name has been changed
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