For the past several years, while most countries around the world continued to ramp up the war on drugs and push criminalisation, Aotearoa New Zealand has been quietly positioning itself at the forefront of harm reduction, particularly when it comes to drug checking. Most of the time when you hear success stories like these, drug checking services are limited to music festivals or nightlife settings. But what New Zealand has developed is a national model that operates year-round across all major cities.
Today, anyone in New Zealand can walk into a drug checking service, have a drug sample tested free of charge, and walk away knowing exactly what’s in their supply, along with harm reduction information on how to consume it safely. And it’s 100% legal.
Drug checking services were first piloted in 2017 and became legal in 2021 with an amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, giving official license to five drug checking providers. This major win was the result of decades of sustained advocacy from civil society organisations. Crucially, drug possession and consumption remains criminalised, but the law includes a practical exemption that allows people to carry substances to and from drug checking services. So you can’t be arrested with drugs if you’re on your way to or at a clinic. It’s a bit of a legal loophole, but one happily left unclear for drug checking organisations as it serves their purposes.
The impact has been significant. This system has shifted the conversation around drugs to one rooted in public health over criminalisation and safety rather than punishment. Drug checking capacity has also expanded in the past five years: today, more than 10,000 samples of substances are tested per year. KnowYourStuffNZ alone tested 3,943 samples in 2024, while NZ Drug Foundation tested another 3,213, with a few thousands more tested across needle exchange programmes across New Zealand. And surveys indicate that drug testing does influence consumer behaviour: of those that had samples that turned out to be not what they expected, 50% said they would not take the substance.
To better understand how this system works in practice, TalkingDrugs spoke to Jez Weston, Deputy Manager of KnowYourStuffNZ, one of the organisations at the heart of New Zealand’s drug checking network.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andre Gomes: What are the advantages of having a national drug checking system in place? What has been essential to make it work?
Jez Weston: What’s made it work is everybody working together. So it’s all of the drug checking providers: ourselves, NZ Drug Foundation, needle exchange programs, even the authorities. So we have a thing called High Alert, which is the Ministry of Health, customs and police all working together. We get information from the border, we get information from hospitals, from ambulances, we share information about the testing that we’re seeing. It all gets pulled so we can all respond together.
AG: Can you talk about the value of having a national drug checking service that isn’t just happening within festival contexts. Why is it important to have it in cities as well?
JW: Most of the drugs that people take are not at festivals. Now we can meet people at festivals. We can talk with them about their drug use, what they’re planning, how they can reduce their risks, and we know from what they’ve told us, that they might take their first drugs at festivals. They get it tested, they’re going to have a great time when they go away from the festival. That actually changes their behavior. They’re a bit more cautious, a bit more respectful around drugs, and that really is where all the impact comes from. Festivals are very supportive environments. You’ve got friends there. You’ve got medics there, right?
But what if you’re at home and you’re on your own, or you might be a long way away from a hospital? If you’re taking drugs in that situation, then that’s actually in some ways more risky. So if we can influence people’s behavior there and then, that’s where the real benefits come from.
AG: Does most of the drug checking in New Zealand happen in parties, or in the city?
JW: It’s pretty much a mix. At festivals, we do thousands of tests. We also have community clinics running, I want to say, five days out of seven in a lot of the main urban centers.So it’s really accessible. Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington, Nelson, Hamilton pop up clinics in other locations. So that’s pretty good coverage of where most New Zealanders are. What we’d love to be doing is reaching out beyond that. Because New Zealand is pretty sparsely populated. There’s a lot of people in very small communities that are a long way away from the city. We’d love to be able to do mail in testing. So if you’re living in the back and beyond, you’ve got some and can post it off to us. We can test it, get you the results. We can’t do that right now. We’d love to, but the law says no. But we are working on it.
AG: Have you had any success stories when it comes to drug testing and putting out results in a quick manner?
JW: Fentanyl is not really a big thing in New Zealand, but not too many years back it put, I think, 11 people in hospital one weekend on the Friday. Someone brought in a bag and we got a sample on Saturday. We tested it Sunday, and by Tuesday, we had a national alert out, and next weekend, it was like two people in hospital. And then after that, nothing.
So we can respond very rapidly. And that actual alert? It was us. It was NZ Drug Foundation. It was the police bringing us samples. Everyone just worked together. Because, you know, why would you not do that? This is how it works at a national level. Everybody contributing.
AG: I’m curious about the warning systems. How does it work when a new substance gets tested and something is detected by your services? How do you then get the news out?
JW: That’s happened a whole bunch of times, and often we’ll find something that we’re like: ‘what is this? We don’t know what this is’. It might be associated with some harm that gets reported to us. And we’ve put out warnings even when we didn’t know what it was, we just say: ‘it was this particular color in this location, these particular pills, they’ve been putting people in hospital. We’re going to try and find out what it is. But in the meantime, don’t take it or treat it with caution.’
And we can take samples, send them off to the labs, and find out what they actually are. We all just get together and go, okay well, what does the warning look like? We’ve got some templates, we’ve got process, but ultimately, at the end of the day, we need to be putting out information that can help people understand the risks and stay safe. So that’s really our focus.
AG: Five years in, what have you seen as the main messages that have been successful to convince politicians, policymakers, the public about the importance of drug checking?
JW: ‘This works. This keeps people safe. Why would you not want to do that? It’s as simple as that. Look, there are risks around drugs. There are benefits. Let’s help people understand the risks, maximise the benefits.’
New Zealand is a small country, at the end of some very long supply chains. Often our drug supply is expensive, so people don’t want to throw the drugs away, right? The quality can be pretty variable. Right now, most of the drugs are what they’re supposed to be, but in previous years, it’s been a bit shitty, and you don’t want people taking shitty drugs. So if we can give people that information, they can stay away and they can reduce their risks. Even just basic things, like if you’re taking drugs, don’t mix them with alcohol. Real basic stuff like that is a real key message for a lot of people to help them reduce their risks and stay safe and have a good time.
AG: Now that the system’s existed for a few years, have you evolved from basic harm reduction messaging to different kinds of messages?
JW: The message has always got to be the right message for the right person, right? And so we serve people at festivals. Needle exchange serves very different communities. For festivals, it’s often young people going to their first festival, right? So often that conversation is at an intro level. ‘You’ve got a bag. There’s multiple doses in here. Don’t take the whole bag at once.’ It’s literally as simple as that. Whereas someone at a needle exchange, they might have a long standing relationship with a client, and so they’re going to get to know them. They’re going to understand something about their life and link them with whatever support they might need, which might not be about drugs at all. It might be that they’ve got a bunch of issues in their life and drugs are something separate to that. Really, it’s about just connecting with each person, whoever you’re doing the tests for, and trying to help them, meet them where they’re at, and do what you can for them.
