Do you know your stuff?

ISSUE FOUR/20 | RONGOĀ / DRUGS

By Know Your Stuff NZ | @knowyourstuffnz | https://knowyourstuff.nz/

Hi! We’re KnowYourStuffNZ, a peer-led drug harm reduction organisation. We’ve been checking people’s drugs and helping people reduce their drug-related risks in Aotearoa since 2015. We got the Misuse of Drugs Act permanently changed in 2021 so we could do our job without our clients or us getting arrested, which made life WAY easier. 

Why get your drugs checked?

If you’re getting medication from a pharmacy or alcohol from a bar, you’re guaranteed that what you’ve bought is what it’s meant to be. There are laws protecting you from dodgy manufacturers.  Sadly, there’s no quality control on the illicit market, and before drug checking became a thing, people had to FAFO, which put a lot of people in the hospital.  

By the numbers

We do annual testing reports on what we find and publish them on our website. Our first published report back in 2017 showed that only 68% of substances were what they were meant to be. Last year’s report for the 2024-25 season showed 91% of substances were what they were meant to be. 9% still isn’t a great number, so we definitely recommend you come and get your drugs checked. 

How it works

It’s pretty simple. People bring us something they’ve bought and are thinking about taking, then we test it to find out what’s in their substance. Once we’ve got the results, we tell the person what we’ve found, and if they want to take their substance, we’ll give them tips on how to reduce their risks when they do. 

We can test most things people bring us. We mainly test

• Powders (e.g., cocaine or Tusi)

• Pills (e.g., MDMA, benzos, or opioids)

• Crystals (e.g., ketamine or speed)

• Liquids and oils (e.g., GHB or 1,4-BD)

• Tabs (e.g., LSD)

• Some plant material, but it depends on the plant.

  
  

The tech

We have a couple of ways of finding out what’s in people’s stuff. Our main method is with an FTIR spectrometer that shoots infrared light through the sample we take. That infrared light takes a ‘fingerprint’ of the sample and compares that ‘fingerprint’ against our library of substances, and gives us the best match that it can find. We’ve got about 40,000 substance fingerprints to compare the sample to, and it’s updated every time we find something new. 

We use strip tests and reagents to find substances in people’s samples when they’re present in too tiny an amount for the spectrometer to see, like fentanyl and nitazines. 

Sadly, we can’t reliably test peptides yet, but we’re working on getting the tech to make that happen. 

High-quality harm reduction yarns

Once we’ve figured out what’s in someone’s sample, we tell them what we’ve found, and we have a chat about that substance. If they still want to take it, we have a conversation with them about how to reduce their risks, like safer ways to take that substance, how to get their dose right, potentially risky interactions (alcohol, medications, other drugs), and so on. We’ve also got a bunch of sweet harm reduction information handouts people can take away and share if they want.

If the substance turns out to be something unexpected, like if they’ve bought what they thought was cocaine and it turned out to be a mixture of creatine and anaesthetic, or it turns out to be something harmful, we can dispose of their sample in our bleach jar.  

And no, we don’t confiscate people’s substances, even if they’re high risk. We believe that people are perfectly capable of making the best decisions for themselves and will reduce their risks when given clear, evidence-based information. We’ve been doing this for over a decade now, and nobody’s proved us wrong.

Where can you find us?

We post on Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and LinkedIn, so feel free to drop us a line if you’ve got questions. 

We do fortnightly checking clinics at the Button Factory on Abbey Street in town from 6-9pm. There’s also a daily checking clinic at NZ Drug Foundation HQ on Richmond Street in Grey Lynn. You can find the full details for the clinics around the motu on thelevel.org.nz