Pubdate: Mon, 25 Aug 2014
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Page: C3
Copyright: 2014 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html
Website: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Anne-Marie Vettorel
Cited: Toronto's Trip Project: http://www.tripproject.ca/trip/

DRUG-TEST KITS COULD SAVE LIVES AT SHOWS

Not Always Effective, But Growing In Popularity

Drug-testing kits currently available in Canada have limitations, but
they can be part of the solution to help prevent unnecessary deaths at
concerts such as Toronto's Veld music festival, where two people died
earlier this month after taking what's believed to be party drugs,
says a harm=reduction group.

Toronto's Trip Project says the testing kits, when combined with other
strategies like drug education, could make drug use safer for people
who will not abstain.

"People die at music festivals. That's not a thing that we should just
accept," said Lori Kufner, a co-ordinator with the city-funded
organization.

Kufner said that testing kits for synthetic so-called party drugs may
be a way of reducing risks, but they aren't widely used and some
people who take drugs don't even know they're available.

"There's a lot of other drugs that are being created and sold and
passed off as other substances. Buying street drugs, you never really
know what it is," she said.

"If you test it for something and it ends up being something that you
didn't think it was going to be, you can still make an informed
decision of whether to toss it or do it anyway."

Health Canada says all synthetic club drugs are considered equally
harmful and are unsafe even in so-called pure forms.

Police are still trying to determine what drugs may have been consumed
by a 20-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man who died, and 13 others
who were sickened at the Veld Music Festival in Toronto's Downsview
Park. Police said all 15 people ingested what they believe was a party
drug purchased at the festival.

Adrienne Smith, a staff lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society in
Vancouver, said that simply condemning the use of illegal drugs is not
a solution. "Currently, illicit drug use is happening at parties. What
we do about that is the important question," she said.

"What the harm-reduction community has decided to do is to acknowledge
that it's happening and to address some of the harms so that people
don't die." But drug-test kits remain "under the radar," said Karim
Rifaat, the owner of Test Kit Plus, a Montreal company that sells the
kits online.

"A lot of people who like to use drugs recreationally don't even know
that it's possible to test them," he said.

He stressed that the kits are not 100 per cent accurate.

"It's not as good as sending it to a lab," he said, but they allow
people to get an overall idea of the constituents of a capsule, tablet
or powder-drug sample.

"If you have no idea what's in your tablet and you just take it,
that's probably one of the worst things you can do," he said.

Testing a substance, Kufner said, requires mixing a single drop of
chemical reagent with a sample of the party drug (usually a scraping
of powder the size of the tip of a pen) on a glass or ceramic plate,
and comparing the colour of the reaction to a chart.

Andrew Jolie, an electronic music enthusiast, said he has seen people
use test kits in Miami, but not in Canada.

"Generally, they turn different colours for different substances. The
ones I've seen, for (popular club drug) MDMA it would turn a dark
blue, and for speed or cocaine or some other kind of amphetamine, it
would turn green or yellow," he said.

The kits are available for sale online and cost about $25. Rifaat said
Test Kit Plus has been selling them for about a year, and awareness -
and business - is "growing."  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D