Wendy Allison is the driving force behind a new law that will help to keep festivalgoers safe this summer by allowing them to have their party drugs tested. By Russell Brown.
“The world’s paying attention,” muses Wendy Allison. “Oh my God. It is validating. It’s also kind of scary.”
Fifty-one-year-old Allison has been talking to international media since Parliament passed the Drug and Substance Checking Act at the end of 2021, making New Zealand the first country in the world to formally legalise and regulate the confidential checking of controlled drugs.
The organisation she founded, Know Your Stuff, has been both a leading advocate and a test case for the reform. Now, what she has been doing for the past seven years is explicitly legal. And it's all because she wanted a farm.
For a long time, Allison would have looked like an unlikely engineer of groundbreaking legal reform.
She grew up in a small Northland town, tried studying law aged 18, dropped out and spent years in shearing gangs, then as a full-time shepherd and eventually as a trainer for shepherds. She still looks – and is – rangy and fit enough to shear a sheep.
But in 2001, she realised that work would never earn her the "millions" she needed to realise the dream of a farm of her own. She moved from Wairarapa to a job in workplace training in Wellington and began studying social policy and criminology part-time. Then, just after she got her degree in 2013, there was a turning point.
"I was working in risk management for an event," she recalls. "There were a bunch of pills going around. Some people were taking them and having a really good time. And some people were taking what looked like exactly the same pills and ending up having psychotic breaks and serious medical problems for four to eight hours at a time.
"And the medics approached us after this event and said, 'Look, if you don't do something about this, someone's going to die.'
The team had a serious conversation about its options. One option was to do nothing "and wait for people to die". Another was to take a hard-line zero-tolerance approach to drugs by bringing in the police and sniffer dogs, and searching people.
"Because of the study I'd been doing about drug policy and its impacts, I knew that wasn't necessarily a solution. In Australia, there was a much higher rate of injury and death related to drugs where they did that."
The third option was harm reduction. New Zealanders have been using MDMA and LSD, our two most popular illicit party drugs, for decades. Trying to frighten or police them out of that would cause more problems than it solved. But if they were able to test what they were about to take, their risk could be minimised.
Allison had studied the New Zealand Needle Exchange Programme, which has operated legally since the late 1980s. "That has been incredibly successful in keeping HIV rates low in New Zealand. We agreed that this was the best option in terms of outcome, and persuaded the event to allow us to run a very small and discreet pilot.
"We gave them plausible deniability of our presence and we just went ahead and did it. And any problems, they were our problems, basically."
I first met Allison not long after, when we both wanted to speak on the same topic at an "unconference" in Warkworth. But Allison had something I didn't: data. She kept a careful record of what she and her colleagues found when they tested.
"We started collecting our evidence right from day one," she recalls. "We didn't really know what we were going to find, but we very quickly realised the value of those numbers – and that nobody else was collecting this data. And when we realised that what we were doing was effective, we could use it to demonstrate that."
An introduction to the New Zealand Drug Foundation followed – and with that, a grant to buy their first portable spectrometer, a briefcase-sized device that provided more precise results than the chemical reagent tests they had been using.
It was especially useful in distinguishing between different members of a class of synthetic drugs called cathinones, which had flooded the global market in the early 2000s, after a United Nations effort briefly succeeded in interrupting the supply of MDMA by making safrole, a key precursor ingredient for real MDMA, almost impossible to obtain.
By the time European chemists had found a way to make MDMA without safrole, Pandora's box was open and there were hundreds of poorly understood cathinones abroad, some more dangerous than others.
Where a new substance emerged locally, Know Your Stuff has invariably been the first to identify it. But even as emergency medics and police began to rely on the information it was providing, Section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act still promised severe penalties for event organisers found to "knowingly allow" controlled drugs to be consumed on a site they managed.
Letting drug-checkers operate at a music festival was surely tantamount to knowing. Police on the ground – always more pragmatic than politicians – didn't interfere, but most festival promoters were wary of, at the least, voiding their event insurance.
Those who did allow Know Your Stuff on site were obliged to pretend they had no idea what was going on.
"The law was criminalising event organisers for having us there," Allison says. "We knew that if we'd gone to the Government and asked for permission, it would have dismissed us out of hand. Without significant evidence and public support, we wouldn't be able to round up the political will.
"A couple of our first meetings with politicians were just like, they didn't want to know. They weren't interested in us — we were just a bunch of festival hippies that, you know, wanted to take drugs."
The police, however, were more interested in talking.
"It was all very in the background to start off with because the police are not able to be a political organisation. To come out openly in support of us would have made them political, because we weren't really legal at that point. But they were also very, very interested in our data and how it could be used to help prevent harm, because they have this role in the community of preventing harm."
Public support grew, coming "for the most part from the parents of kids who go to festivals, who were saying, 'I just want my kid to come home.' And then there was Stuart Nash."
In 2018, police analysis of drugs seized at the big New Year's Eve festival Rhythm and Vines found dangerous substances – including, it appeared, pesticides. Later, more careful analysis published by a group of Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) scientists found it wasn't pesticide at all, but at the time it was enough for Nash, then Minister of Police, to call for drug-checking at all festivals in time for the following summer.
The ESR scientists agreed, noting that the handheld devices used by police had been unable to identify more than half the samples and recommending collaboration with "on-site testing services".
A move to amend the law was stymied when Labour's coalition partner, New Zealand First, blocked it, but after the 2020 general election, an interim law was rushed through to a promise Nash had made. It turned out to be timely.
With no community transmission of Covid-19, New Zealanders were able to flock to summer events – and for tens of thousands of mostly younger people, that meant going to music festivals. Glastonbury might have been silenced, but Rhythm and Vines was in full cry.
But there was a problem. The havoc the pandemic played with global supply lines affected the supply of illicit goods, too.
For the summer when Nash had first made his promise, Know Your Stuff reported that 87 per cent of the samples brought to it for checking were as presumed. Last summer, it soon became apparent that as much as half the MDMA supply had been supplanted by a more easily sourced, visually indistinguishable, but much more dangerous cathinone: eutylone.
Hundreds of New Year festivalgoers reported alarming symptoms – including paranoia, seizures, severe nausea and inability to sleep for days – after taking eutylone sold to them as MDMA. In a few cases, emergency mental-health services were called in.
It could have been far worse had Know Your Stuff not put out a warning. Dozens of eutylone deaths have been reported overseas.
An independent study by Victoria University of Wellington researchers – a condition of the interim law – later found that behaviour change was "evident" after young people used drug-checking services and discovered they had been duped. According to the study, "harm reduction advice is valued and acted upon by young people".
This was congruent with Know Your Stuff's own data, which had long found that about two-thirds of people decided not to take drugs which had been shown by testing to be dodgy. Rather than encouraging drug-taking, testing turns out to be a remarkably effective deterrent.
Know Your Stuff is the first organisation to be gazetted for testing under the new law. This summer, it will have 160 volunteers in the field, either at events or pop-up testing clinics. It will also have – for the first time and over the howling of Opposition MPs – some public funding to cover its costs.
Allison is pleased that it has been joined by the Needle Exchange Programme, her original inspiration. "We've been working with them since May 2021 to develop a pilot and support them to train their staff, the whole process through to them becoming an independent provider of the service. We do recognise the privilege inherent in our clientele and the work that we do. We are not the right people to be swooping into these communities where drug harm is happening and going, 'We'll fix it for you, we know exactly what's going on in your community' – because that's just not true.
"Our clients are predominantly privileged white kids at festivals. There are people who are being harmed by drugs but are not able to afford a festival ticket and aren't shown like this in the media.
"They're shown in dark rooms with hoodies and they don't get the profile that we do, because they are not palatable to the dominant culture and they don't have the resources to change that. And I think that that is a great injustice in this country."
Many of Know Your Stuff's volunteers come from high-level-knowledge jobs. Allison's deputy, Jez Weston, for example, is a partner in a venture-capital firm focused on climate-change initiatives. She thinks that's because drug policy is "a wicked problem that has no simple solution and a whole lot of disciplines that feed into it. There is a way for pretty much anyone who's geeky about this topic to be involved in their area of expertise."
Allison is yet to make the millions she went to Wellington for, but she and her partner did eventually buy a farm, back in Wairarapa.
"It's 10 acres [4ha] – the size of a postage stamp, but it's our postage stamp. We've planted a quarter of it in natives and the rest of it is in pasture. We have sheep, an orchard, vegetables, chooks, and we're basically living the good life over here."
The farm also doubles as the head office of Know Your Stuff, which now means it's world famous in Wairarapa. She shrugs.
"At my core, I am still just trying to help people. I didn't ask to be running a national organisation, and I didn't ask to have the attention of the world on us. We've all just adapted to cope with it as it has gone along.
“But, yeah, it is definitely validating to have set out seven years ago, going, ‘I just want to help people’, and, suddenly, we’re changing the world. I mean, that is pretty cool.”
