Such is the growing interest in drug checking that 31st March 2017 was declared the first ‘International Drug Checking Day’.

In the UK, some public health (Royal Society for Public Health, 2017) and police (Jamieson, 2018) bodies have endorsed the measure. The international opioid overdose crisis and associated contamination of illegal drug markets with fentanyl and other analogues has added further impetus to consideration of this public health intervention (Tupper, McCrae, Garber, Lysyshyn, & Wood, 2018).Ī global review of drug checking services identified 31 services in operation in 20 countries in 2017, with DIMS the longest running (Barratt, Kowalski, Maier, & Ritter, 2018). A third wave of expansion occurred in the UK, North America and Australasia in recent years as new technologies and New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) emerged, making publicly accessible forensic testing for harm reduction purposes more feasible, more accurate and more pertinent. In 1992 a Dutch government-funded Drug Information and Monitoring System (DIMS) was established and similar services sprung up across Europe in subsequent years (Brunt, 2017 Brunt and Niesink, 2011 Kriener et al., 2001).

The second wave of drug safety testing occurred in 1990s Europe with the advent of acid house, rave and electronic dance music and the associated use of synthetic ‘party drugs’ such as MDMA at dance events. The first wave of analysis of street drugs by community based drugs services was in late 1960s and early 1970s California, with the origins dated to San Francisco in 1965 (Marshman, 1974 Smith, 1974).

Drug checking (drug safety testing, pill testing, street drug analysis) – a public health intervention that allows the general public to submit substances for content analysis – has existed for over 50 years.

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