Drug checking to improve monitoring of new psychoactive substances in Australia

Abstract

As has been reported previously in the Journal, 1 novel psychoactive stimulant drugs are now increasingly prevalent in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments. A further cluster of 11 patients showing confusing hallmarks of sympathomimetic poisoning but no identifiable substance presented to St Vincent ’ s Hospital in Sydney over a public holiday weekend in April 2015. Also, the start to the 2015 e 2016 summer festival season has included multiple deaths and hospitalisations following drug use at festivals, leading to calls for novel actions to protect public health. 2 Here, we take the opportunity to describe a method of harm minimisation that has been deployed in Europe and could potentially be deployed locally to tackle this problem. As has been reported previously in the Journal, 1 novel psychoactive stimulant drugs are now increasingly prevalent in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments. A further cluster of 11 patients showing confusing hallmarks of sympathomimetic poisoning but no identifiable substance presented to St Vincent ’ s Hospital in Sydney over a public holiday weekend in April 2015. Also, the start to the 2015 e 2016 summer festival season has included multiple deaths and hospitalisations following drug use at festivals, leading to calls for novel actions to protect public health. 2 Here, we take the opportunity to describe a method of harm minimisation that has been deployed in Europe and could potentially be deployed locally to tackle this problem.