International Overdose Awareness Day

Know Your Stuff NZ

International Overdose Awareness Day is on August 31. It’s a global day of remembrance, giving space for those of us who have lost people to drug overdose to take a minute and miss our loved ones.

Accidental drug overdose is the reason KnowYourStuffNZ began.

In the beginning…

12 years ago a batch of “MDMA” was being sold that was definitely not MDMA. It put a bunch of people in hospital, which at the time was considered normal and an acceptable consequence of taking drugs. FA, FO. 

Nobody in charge was going to do anything to change this. In their minds, if people wanted to avoid drug harm they could simply not take drugs. Ezpz.

Except people do take drugs. People have been taking drugs since prehistoric times, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Pretending that drug prohibition is an effective form of drug harm reduction has been getting people killed since the 1970s. With this new high risk drug on the market back in 2015, it was only a matter of time before somebody wound up in hospital or the morgue. The choices in front of us were:

1. Maintain the status quo: continue waiting for more compassionate and effective drug legislation, and let people die in the mean time

2. Do something. 

   
   

If you want something done right, do it yourself

Weirdly enough, letting people die just because they were breaking the law felt like a cop-out. Our founder (and Victoria University alumna) Wendy Allison set up a tent with a table and a set of reagents in the back paddock at KiwiBurn 2015, and KnowYourStuffNZ was born.

Only 20% of the drugs checked in the summer of 2014-2015 were what they were meant to be. Summer 2015-2016 was a little bit better with 40 percent of people’s drugs being what they were meant to be. *

The NZ Drug Foundation heard what we were doing and thought it was brilliant. They lent us a spectrometer for the 2016-2017 season and our checking capabilities levelled up. The annual reports on the substances we’d found over the years gave us the evidence we needed to amend the Misuse of Drugs Act and make drug checking explicitly, permanently legal in 2021. 

Drug checking prevents accidental overdose

Drug checking is a pretty simple process. People bring us their substances, we do science to find out what’s in their substances, then give them advice on reducing their risks based on what we find including dosage, risky interactions, comedown and hangover maintenance, and so on. 

Before drug checking, people had to trust that their substances were what they were meant to be, and deal with the consequences as they happened. This didn’t always work out. Sometimes their substances were something inert, like milk powder or creatine, and their dealer had ripped them off. Sometimes their substances were something high risk that put them in hospital. 

Giving people the ability to know what they’d bought before they took it was a game-changer because, if something turned out to be high risk, people would choose not to take their substance. Wild, right? Absolutely shocking. 

Some of you might remember 2020-2021’s “Summer of Eutylone” where 30% of samples tested were not as presumed. People were going to hospital after taking “MDMA” up and down the country and it was pretty damn messy. Most of those samples were MDMA that had either been swapped for or cut with eutylone. Our testing results for that year showed 68% of people said they wouldn’t take their drugs when their sample came back as something unexpected.

The thing to keep in mind is that, before those people had gotten their MDMAybe tested, they were 110% going to take their drugs. They’d spent the money and they’d broken the law and made that active choice. When they found their MDMA was actually eutylone, they changed their behaviour and chose not to take it. Anyone who’s heard of the sunk cost fallacy knows how hard that is to break. 

We’ve been drug checking in Aotearoa for eleven years now, and it’s become pretty normal, which is awesome! Other places aren’t so lucky* and we’re incredibly grateful that we can provide people legal protection while using drug checking services—and that people trust us with their safety. 

We love a responsible hedonist, and the world is a much better place with you in it. We’ve got a special drug checking clinic happening for International Overdose Awareness Day at VUWSA HQ, Kelburn campus. We’d love it if you came and said hi.

Clinic details

When: 10 a.m. - 2 p.m., August 31

Where: The Board Room, VUWSA Building, Kelburn Campus

*Receipts in the 2016-2017 testing report

**Queensland had legal drug checking, but in October 2025 it was outlawed. A couple of weeks later people were overdosing on nitazenes that had been sold as MDMA.