Drug checking in Australia and New Zealand: Ask us anything!

Psychoactive drug use is an enduring and important part of the lives of many of us, despite the last 60+ years of prohibition. Unregulated drug markets create significant health risks, where people may unknowingly procure unexpected substances or consume drugs of unknown strength or dose. Drug checking services (also known as pill testing services) can address this issue by offering members of the public the opportunity to find out what is in their drugs to inform their substance use. These services are free and anonymous. Data from these services can be shared as alerts and information briefs to inform the wider drug-using community of what is in circulation, particularly when risky substances are detected.

While non-sanctioned (i.e. underground and legally-ambiguous) drug checking has been operating in Australia for many decades, alongside individuals using reagent kits and immunoassay test strips to test their own drugs, government-endorsed and sanctioned drug checking services have now emerged across Australia and New Zealand. These sanctioned services began operating in Australia at Canberra festivals pre-pandemic (2018 and 2019). After the pandemic, the ACT opened its fixed site, CanTEST, in July 2022, which is now permanent. CheQpoint, in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, was open for a year from April 2024 to April 2025, and festival drug checking has taken place in Queensland since March 2024. Victoria launched festival drug checking in December 2024 and a fixed site in August 2025, while NSW launched festival drug checking in March 2025. Following pioneering work at festivals by KnowYourStuffNZ, New Zealand became the first country to legalise drug checking in 2021, and now has multiple providers.

Clearly there have been a lot of developments in this space in the last few years, with different service delivery models, communities and settings being explored. There are also gaps: currently, there are no community based drug checking operations in rural locations, nor are there any postal drug checking services available in Australia or New Zealand. Additionally, drug checking services do not typically accept plant/fungal materials for analysis.

In this panel, we have brought together representatives from across Australia and New Zealand, including people with expertise across the different disciplines that feed into drug checking - analytical chemistry, health, communications, research - with living experience of drug use cutting across all of these expertise domains. Our goals are to have robust discussions about the challenges and opportunities of the varieties of drug checking services currently operating, to learn from each other, and to support each other’s efforts to advance the health, wellbeing and human rights of people who use drugs. Ensuring that communities of people who use drugs are empowered to lead service design and are directly involved in service delivery is critical to gain and maintain community trust in these services.

This panel will provide an opportunity for the EGA community to interrogate drug checking service leaders about how these services work and explore any barriers, concerns or questions the EGA community may have with utilising these services.

With Monica Barratt as the panel convener and MC, the panel will include the following guests who will bring unique insights on the topic of drug checking:

Cameron Francis – CEO of The Loop Australia, AOD specialist social worker, has led drug checking in Queensland for The Loop, attended almost all Victorian festival drug checking deliveries, and has a strong knowledge base on drugs and the importance of equitable drug harm reduction. Also an EGA regular attendee.

Liam Engel – Liam Engel is an ethnobotanist, natural products chemist and science communicator specialising in psychoactive plants. Liam conducts research at the National Institute of Complementary Medicine (NICM) Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, and is co-founder of The Mescaline Garden nursery. Liam has assisted in the operation of drug checking services in Canberra and Queensland alongside Pill Testing Australia, and in Portugal alongside Kosmicare.

Erica Franklin- Project and Communications Lead for Pill Testing Australia and Harm Reduction Worker at CanTest. Erica brings over a decade of experience in harm reduction, specialising in delivering harm reduction initiatives for festival and night life settings and translating harm reduction information into the digital landscape. As a person with lived-living experience of drug use, she is deeply and passionately committed to empowering communities and championing human rights, social justice, and self-determined health.

Jacob Fry – Chemistry Lead, Victorian Pill Testing Service. Jacob is the chemist lead for the Victorian service and has led chemistry for The Loop Australia for many years. Jacob can provide direct insight into the chemistry related processes and challenges of running drug checking in Australia and specifically within the Victorian service.

Mitch Lamb – Communications and Administration manager for The Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation & Advocacy (CAHMA) and the CAHMA team leader for peers working at the CanTEST Health and Drug Checking service. Mitch brings a passion for harm reduction developed through his 15 year career in music festivals, nightclubs and more recently as an advocate - sitting on the MusicACT committee. Curious and committed, Mitch specialises in peer education and has a particular interest in NPS drugs emerging in the Australian party circuit.

Nick Kent – Nick Kent is the Policy Lead at Harm Reduction Victoria, the peak organisation representing people who use drugs in this state. HRVic is a key partner in the design and delivery of the Victorian service. Nick has a long history of advocacy for people who use drugs, including through his leadership of SSDP Australia over many years.

Isabelle Volpe – Isabelle Volpe is a critical drug studies researcher at the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), and former Communications Lead at The Loop Australia. She has worked across research, advocacy, and service delivery, with a focus on the politics of drug policy, participation, and risk communication. Isabelle’s research has included focussed attention to ways that data and information from drug checking services are communicated in practice, spanning projects based in Australia and the UK, in a variety of settings and with a variety of ‘publics’.

Sam Lasham - Researcher at the University of Auckland investigating drug checking approaches for people who use psilocybin mushrooms with a focus on therapeutic use. He has worked for multiple drug checking organisations in New Zealand, both pre and post legalisation, is the founder of SSDP Aotearoa, and a board member of Psilver Linings, New Zealand’s only psilocybin mushroom specific harm reduction provider.