Festival Insights NEWS: Drug Testing, Drug Checking and their effects on reducing the risk of drug harm

UK drug checking charity, The Loop, is dedicated to reducing drug harm. We asked their recently appointed CEO, Katy Porter, along with The Loop Colleagues to update us on the research and data that underpins their service.

Music festivals are leisure environments where larger numbers of people take larger quantities of legal and illegal drugs, spread across longer time periods than in everyday life. For example, in terms of recent use, 11.4% of young adults aged 16-24 in England and Wales report having had an illicit drug in the last month (Home Office, 2020), by comparison with over two thirds (67.8%) of English festival-goers (Measham & Simmons, 2022). Despite some events still adopting a “zero tolerance” approach to drug use, many festivals are implementing alternative policies to reduce the harms of drug use on-site. Two approaches, which have been developed onsite in recent years, both in the UK and…