A drug testing pilot - first introduced at Electric Picnic last year - is to be rolled out to other music festivals this year, according to Health officials.
The scheme, operated by the Health Service Executive (HSE) Safer Nightlife programme, operates as a ‘back of house’ drug checking service with an aim to identify drug market trends of concern and keep people safe.
The drug testing programme will begin at Life festival in Mullingar this Friday and involves festival goers anonymously putting drugs into HSE surrender bins at the HSE harm reduction tent and the festival medical tent.
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The substances will then be moved by accredited staff members to an onsite portable laboratory and analysed by staff from the HSE National Drug Treatment Centre Laboratory using a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) machine.
Professor Eamon Keenan said drugs are becoming stronger and more dangerous bringing higher risk.
"What we're seeing is higher potency substances,” Professor Keenan said on RTE Radio 1’s Morning Ireland.
“We mentioned the MDMA tablet from last summer but also the pills and powders are higher strength I suppose and with higher strength or higher potency comes higher risk, particularly from the mental health perspective."
He said there has been an increase in the use of cannabis edibles and synthetic cannabinoids.
Prof Keenan said that people who surrender drugs are not at risk of being arrested.
"This is a health-led initiative. We want to get information to people who are at these events and there's no judgement of people."
He said the identification of high potency drugs, including a new substance, at Electric Picnic, was very useful.
At last year’s Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally, Co Laois, the ‘first of its kind’ pilot scheme found high-strength MDMA samples and a new substance 3-CMC not detected in Ireland before.
And with hundreds of thousands of people attending festivals across Ireland this summer, the HSE said it wants people to stay safe and drug testing at music festivals has been used as a harm reduction strategy.
Organisers of this year’s Indiependence Festival, which is set to take place in Mitchelstown, Cork from Friday, August 4 to Sunday, August 6, said they welcome “anything that will aid with harm reduction.”
“The HSE has done phenomenal work here over the last couple of years,” a spokesperson for the festival organisers, told this paper.
“At Indie we welcome anything that will aid with harm reduction.
The organisers also said that they would prefer if consumption of illegal substances did not happen.
“However, we have to be realistic about it, education and harm reduction have to go hand in hand with any prevention measures.”
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