Babe Wake Up, New Drug Stats Just Dropped Graphs never looked so snortable

The New Zealand Drug Foundation has released their first-ever report on drug checking stats. 2022 was the first full year where drug checking was licensed and legal, so here’s a cheeky summary of all things snorted, swallowed, and injected:

One-third of drugs brought in to be tested were not what they were sold as. 21% of them were a mix of the presumed drug and other substances, and 12% a different substance entirely. A little concerningly, the report also found that if drugs were found not to be exactly what they were expected, 54% of people said they would still take it. On the flipside, KnowYourStuff revealed that all of the 87 drug samples tested at the recent Hyde St Party were what party-goers thought they were.

Breathas are on trend with their drugs of choice, it seems, as the general trends of drugs in NZ found by the Drug

Foundation’s report were consistent with what KnowYourStuff found at Hyde, with MDMA and ket as the forerunners. According to the report, MDMA appeared in the most tests in 2022, making up 980 out of a total 1720 samples. Ketamine followed up behind with 86 samples, and cocaine in third place with 70 samples. How anyone is affording coke in this economy is beyond us.

The report detailed a scary new substance: NBOMes, a very potent stimulant and psychedelic which has been linked to multiple deaths overseas. Here, it’s being sold as LSD. New benzos are being sold too, but they have wildly variable dosage rates. Benzodiazepines are active in very small doses, so taking them without knowing how much you are actually taking is a recipe for overdose. Not good. And cathinones (AKA bath salts) which terrorised the 2020/2021 festival season, are still masquerading as drugs

By Amelia Blockley Contributor

like MDMA, with new, lesser-documented variations being found last year.

The NZ Drug Foundation works alongside KnowYourStuffNZ and the NZ Needle Exchange, both of whom have been committed to drug harm reduction for over a decade. Drug testing services like KnowYourStuff pride themselves on pushing drug harm reduction conversations about safe drug-use, how to test drugs, and how they might interact with other substances.

If drug harm reduction is an issue that you feel passionately about, KnowYourStuff are always looking for volunteers to assist their testing services. Check them out at knowyourstuff.nz for both information on how to volunteer as well as tips for staying safe. There, you can also find a non-exhaustive list of pills and common drugs that are not always what they seem.