On-site pill testing sounds great. People take the pills they purchased at a music festival to a booth where test kits analyse whether the drugs are safe to consume. This will prevent deaths from bad batches, the reasoning goes.
It sounds fine in theory, but there is one major flaw – pill testing kits currently relied upon to deliver the results are limited by scientific realities. In fact, the proposed colourimetric on-site pill test kits provide results that are little more accurate than "best guesses".
Like everyone else, I would like to ensure that people who consume illicit substances survive the experience. Pill testing may have some role to play, but it is far from the silver bullet that proponents claim.
From a purely practical point of view, on-site drug testing is fast and easy, but not particularly accurate. Proper analysis of pills requires highly sophisticated laboratory equipment and can take days of work by trained scientists.
SafeWork Laboratories has some of the most advanced analytical equipment in Australia. Even then, it takes us more than 24 hours to obtain detailed results. When you add the time to get the pills to the laboratory, accurate results take days, if not weeks to turn around, a timeframe that seems entirely impractical in any real-world situation.
On-site pill testing kits are severely limited in what they detect. Test kits are unlikely to detect contaminants or other toxic compounds in pills. They may indicate that a pill contains MDMA, or ecstasy, but they will not pick up other contaminants. Even a small amount of PMA in a pill – a combination seen previously in Australia – can result in fatalities.
The on-site tests cannot test for concentration. High doses of MDMA and methamphetamine are often fatal by themselves. A pill identified as MDMA at a reasonable concentration is quite capable of being lethal, even if the purity is very high, especially at an outdoor dance party in high temperatures.
The greatest concern however, is that on-site tests cannot detect new designer drugs on the market, such as flakka, liquid acid or NBOMe compounds. NBOMe, or N-Bomb, is a relatively new psychoactive substance (NPS) being detected in Australia. As little as a few thousandths of a gram are enough to cause violent or frightening hallucinations, major cardiac symptoms, nausea, vomiting and potentially death.
Unfortunately, these dangerous compounds frequently are mixed with more familiar drugs, such as ecstasy, speed or ice, requiring highly advanced scientific analysis to be detected. Illicit drugs are not made in modern manufacturing facilities.
There are no production standards, no quality or consistency guarantees. One pill may have a completely different level of active compound from another pill from the same batch, so results from one pill test cannot be relied upon for another.
Countries that have gone down the pill testing route do not provide any comfort that this approach works. Britain has roughly two and a half times Australia's population. In 2015, it had 114 deaths from NPS, a figure that has been rising every year since 2011. Australia recorded less than a dozen deaths from NPS in 2015, yet Britain has pill testing while Australia does not.
European data shows more than 100 new illicit drugs and compounds are entering the market each year. Detection of these compounds is challenging, even in advanced forensic facilities, so the reality is that pill testing kits will never be able to detect all the illicit drugs entering the community. They also potentially leave consumers with a false sense of security that the party drugs they buy may be safe. It could be a deadly assumption.
Andrew Leibie is a scientist with Safework Laboratories, and a member of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists.
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