Illicit drug use carries risks, but new state-supported services are working to reduce harms.
The NSW government has announced it will roll out a drug checking service at up to 15 selected music festivals across the state from October, following a 12-month trial of drug checking services at music festivals completed between March 2025 and February 2026.
The drug checking trial was a recommendation put forward by Magistrate Harriet Graham, NSW Deputy State Coroner, following a 2019 inquest into the deaths of six young people who had taken drugs at music festivals.
The independent trial, led by the University of Sydney, gave festival goers access to a free and anonymous drug checking service at 12 festivals across the state. People could bring a small sample of a substance they intended to consume to be tested for purity, potency and adulterants by qualified health staff.
During the trial, more than 1800 people visited the services and around 1500 drug samples were tested.
For Dr Phillip Wadds , Associate Professor in the School of Law, Society & Criminology and member of the Centre for Criminology, Law & Justice in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW, the uptake was no surprise.
"There's been demand for drug checking for a really long time," he said. "People want to know what is in something they might be consuming; they want to be as safe as they can be. Not that anything's guaranteed, but when there's something available that can improve the safety of drug use, then many people will take that up."
The roll out comes as alcohol consumption has steadily declined , particularly among people aged 18 to 25, who are drinking at lower levels than previous generations. Dr Wadds says this may be contributing to more people turning to illicit drugs instead.
"People still want to party and have a good time... In NSW and across Australia, we have seen the price of alcohol, particularly beer, going up year on year. That's a real deterrent, people just can't afford it. When people go out for a big night out, they could easily spend $300 or $400 in a few hours, or around 10% of that for a pill that will last longer."
Benefits beyond the individual
Drug checking involves more than handing over illicit substances for testing; there's also an educational element, Dr Wadds says. The service is delivered by NSW Health in partnership with NUAA , formerly known as the NSW and Users and AIDS Association.
"In NSW, you will meet with both a forensic chemist and a peer worker, so someone who works at NUAA, who will talk through the results, better practice around consumption and specific guidance around the substance(s) presented."
For example, festival-goers can learn about the effects of combining drugs such as ketamine with alcohol.
Dr Wadds says some people who discover a substance is not what they thought they purchased will discard it in amnesty bins available at drug checking service spaces.
"That immediately removes from circulation something that might've been really dangerous," he says.
The benefits can also extend to the friends of people who use the service. As Dr Wadds highlights, "people who use drugs have always kept - or tried to keep - each other safe" because they all want to "avoid the worst kind of consequence from drug consumption, which nobody wants to see".
"Nobody exists in a vacuum," he adds.
"Individuals often go to a music festival with a group of 10 friends, they share the information with those 10 friends who share with 10 more, and the knowledge grows exponentially. The more people that engage with drug checking and other harm reduction services, the more literacy there is among communities who use drugs and that's really important."
Dr Wadds adds there are potential flow-on benefits for frontline health services.
"It can provide insight into an unregulated drug market," Dr Wadds says.
"If a dangerous adulterant, for instance, nitazenes, is detected in different substances, alerts will be circulated to public health officials, who are then equipped to respond more effectively to what might be presenting to them in an emergency department."
The more people who engage with drug checking and other harm reduction services, the more literacy there is among communities who use drugs.
Festival organisers, who have been advocates of drug checking , can also issue warnings onsite during a festival.
Dr Wadds recalls attending a music festival where "a drug was checked and the organisers literally stopped the video playing and put a picture of the pressed tablet on the screens and said, 'if anybody has bought this type of pressed tablet, please be aware'."
"That's an immediate benefit to the entire community at the festival. It's telling people to either get it checked or think about holding off taking the drug because this is what we found in it," he says.
The drug market is also likely to respond to public health messaging, according to Dr Wadds.
"The drug market is economically sensitive," he says. "If people are posting, 'don't consume this thing because that's cut with fentanyl or this is cut with xylazine', then people aren't going to buy from that person. There's this strong commercial imperative to improve the quality of drug supply."
A good start
Dr Wadds hopes drug checking services will eventually be publicly available outside music festivals at fixed locations in NSW. Permanent drug checking sites already operate in the ACT and Victoria . Vancouver Island in Canada also has a distributed drug checking network which offers strong coverage to the community there.
"One of the biggest barriers to getting your drugs checked at a festival is the fear of being arrested on your way to the service area, because music festivals are heavily policed and [have] surveillance," he said.
"But drug checking at festivals is an entry point to conversations about what that [fixed site checking] looks like in the long term, especially when we can demonstrate the benefits in a setting like a music festival and build broader social community support for a fixed site."
Ultimately, he said, "the more drug checking that takes place, the more insight we have into what is circulating in the drug market and that information supports better safety outcomes which is what we all want".
