The United Kingdom’s largest night club, Warehouse Project, has committed to a new standard of safety for it’s concert goers. Club owner Sacha Lord has hired Fiona Measham, “professor of criminology at Durham University and the UK’s foremost expert on club drug culture,” to look into the substances that are confiscated by the club’s staff and test them for purity and foreign, unwanted chemicals. If a batch comes back containing misleading substances, then the club attendees will be notified of the bad substances through social media and LED signs throughout the venue.
The pilot program occurs once a month and was inspired by the September 27th death of Nick Bonnie, who passed after ingesting ecstasy that was believed to have contained an MDMA substitute called PMA. The substitute is often used when there is a shortage of MDMA and it is known to “kill at lower doses than ecstasy (especially when mixed with other drugs) and can rapidly cause a fatal rise in body temperature.”
Similar programs have been introduced in the states by DanceSafe who offers onsite testing of illicit substances, so owners know exactly what was purchased. DanceSafe recently participated in the TomorrowWorld festival in Atlanta, Georgia and was visited over 10,000 times from concert goers who were looking for education, ear plugs or to unlock the quandary of identifying their illicit substances.
Source: The Guardian
Warehouse Project Documentary via Pitchfork TV:
