Drug testing services are warning recreational drug users of synthetic opioids and cathinones — just as summer parties and festivals kick into gear.
Illicit party drugs such as MDMA were often imported here illegally from Europe, but that distance meant supply here could be unreliable and more dangerous.
Meanwhile, testing service Know Your Stuff has confirmed it wouldn’t return to at least seven events these holidays, where lagging ticket sales have cut budgets for some onsite drug checks.
The service set up stations at more than 170 events last year, where staff took testing faciltities to as many parts of the country as possible.
Deputy manager Dr Jez Watson told 1News: “The gold standard [test] is always the big spectrometers that we use but those are expensive and we haven’t got too many of them.”
Recreational drug users have mostly been requesting tests for their MDMA and ketamine, drugs that Massey University Research has shown, were most commonly used in Otago, Wellington and Christchurch.
Last year, around 89% of drug tests found no red flags, up from a drop to 69% in 2021, when nearly a third of tests showed substances had been substituted, laced or mislabelled.
Know Your Stuff surveys showed that, in recent times, on a third of occasions when tests showed mismatches, the owner still used the drug anyway. Reasons given included they’d not had a bad experience in the past; they were curious; couldn’t get anything else; didn’t want to waste money; or questioned the test results.
Watson added, “sometimes people have just got their drugs mixed up… But what I’d say is, probably the biggest risk for this summer is going to be people taking too much of whatever they’re planning on taking or taking too many different drugs altogether”.
That could mean high-pressure emergencies for paramedics and doctors.
Hato Hone St John’s Auckland operations manager Andy Everiss told 1News: “Our staff are trained to navigate those situations, particularly around just talking to other people because, often at parties, there’s a lot of worried people or people that are potentially on the same substance.”
Doctors also watched for mental health problems such as anxiety and paranoia, and physical signs which drug-taking could cause.
Dr Kate Allan, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine’s New Zealand Board chair, said these symptoms could range from “abnormal cardiac rhythms to vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, going on to the other end of the spectrum, which is sort of the seizures, coma and ultimately it can end in death”.
A New Zealand Drug Foundation report showed 1179 people died in New Zealand from accidental overdoses between 2017 and 2023 and users were asked to be as honest as possible when talking to health workers.
Everiss said: “Just be as honest with us as humanly possible — it is really really difficult to treat patients if we don’t know what we are treating.:
Allan said: “Provided there is no other member of the public that is at harm… If people disclose to us that they’ve taken an illicit substance, that stays within the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship.”
Drug harm was particularly challenging for those managing emergency departments, Allan said.
“Especially if it’s agitated behaviour, aggressive paranoid-type behaviour. It can sometimes mean that we have to use other drugs or medication to try and calm that person down or help us to sedate them. So you’re sort of chasing your tail a bit with that and it’s it causes huge disruption.”
This year, the key problematic traces testers are looking out for, were nitrosines — a type of synthetic opioid — and cathinones — which have caused deaths overseas.
“Those [nitrosines] are potentially very risky,” Watson said.
Ultimately, Allan said the best protection from harm was, put simply, “don’t do drugs, number one”.
