Young people are planning the sunnier months ahead at festivals and clubs across the country. We must not miss this opportunity to protect them from drug-related harm, say Jeff Smith MP and Professor Fiona Measham.
In a building just off Cabot Circus in central Bristol last week, a small group of scientists and healthcare professionals took an important step towards reducing drug-related deaths in the UK. The Loop, a pioneering non-profit drugs service, quietly rolled out the UK’s first city centre testing service open to the public.
The Multi Agency Safety Testing (MAST) service welcomed people from across the city to get their drugs forensically tested in a pop-up lab. The results were followed by a ‘brief intervention’ from a trained drugs worker, along with individually tailored advice on the risks and harms involved with consuming the substance.
Operating with the support of the local police, The Loop were able to inform local health services, alert regional early warning systems, and contact the public directly via social media, about the particularly harmful drugs identified by the lab. For those of us who have seen too many drug-related tragedies, last week’s pilot in Bristol could mark a watershed moment in the way we tackle drug-related harm in the UK.
In the months ahead, UK nightlife will go into overdrive. Pubs will spill out onto the streets, clubs will stay open late into the night, and festivals will pop up in fields and parks around the country. Thousands of people will go out and enjoy live music while relaxing and unwinding with friends.
We know from years of research that drugs are never far away from our clubs and festivals. About a third of UK festival goers report taking illegal drugs at festivals and a fifth of regular clubbers took Class A drugs last year. There is no safe level of drug consumption. Drug use, including drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco, has serious health risks and we shouldn’t shy away from them. Our job, as politicians and academics in this area, is to figure out how best to keep people safe in environments where we know drugs are being taken.
Sadly, the trend line is going the wrong way, fast. Recreational use of so-called ‘club drugs’, primarily ecstasy and cocaine, has remained fairly constant across the last two decades yet drug-related deaths are at their highest levels ever recorded. Ecstasy deaths have increased six-fold since 2010 and hospital admissions linked to cocaine have nearly doubled in the last five years.
The UK has become the drug-related death capital of Europe, accounting for a third of deaths across the continent. The drugs coming onto the illicit market are more potent and more toxic than ever before. Mixed with anything from boric acid to paracetamol and plaster of Paris, we are seeing high strength drugs, mis-sold new psychoactive substances and potentially life-threatening adulterants being sold to young people on streets, in clubs and at festivals around the country.
It is for precisely those reasons that the work The Loop will do in festivals and city venues this summer is so vital. Keeping people safe demands more than zero tolerance rhetoric around drugs, it requires proactive cooperation between local authorities, police forces, promoters and partygoers to identify and remove the most harmful drugs from circulation.
When drug testing was rolled out at Boomtown festival last year, the Loop tested 1,132 samples over three days, almost one every minute that they were there. Social media alerts were sent to festival goers about particularly strong types of pills, as well as a worrying trend of N-ethyl pentylone – a stimulant that can keep users awake for up to 36 hours, leaving them anxious, paranoid and sick – masquerading as MDMA.
As in Bristol over the weekend, approximately 4,000 people who visited The Loop’s tent also received a ‘brief intervention’ from a healthcare professional. Almost one in five people who visited The Loop asked them to dispose of the substance afterwards, and nearly half ended up taking smaller amounts.
An independent report by medical service providers at Boomtown last year estimated that there was a 25 per cent reduction in drug-related medical incidents on site which they believed was predominantly due to the introduction of MAST. They argued that The Loop’s programme encouraged people to seek prompt medical help when they found out the nature of the substances they had taken, as well as alerting festival goers and paramedics about dangerous substances in circulation. Put simply, if the Loop wasn’t there, those 4,000 people and their many friends on site would have taken drugs without any way of knowing what was in them, with potentially life-threatening implications.
Too often, we have taken too little action far too late to reduce the harm associated with drug taking. We have waited for tragedies to occur, and often reacted by doubling down with stricter licensing laws and tougher rhetoric. This year we have the opportunity to do things differently. Let this be the summer that we get ahead of the curve, and keep people safe.
Jeff Smith MP is co-chair of the APPG on drug policy reform, and Professor Fiona Measham is director of The Loop.
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