Thanks to Guy Jones from Reagent Tests UK for the science advice and the concern.
Guy is the Technical Lead at Reagent Tests UK and volunteers with harm reduction groups like The Loop.
"We need to bring down the cost because reagent tests have their limitations, they can only do so much," he said.
Most MDMA kits are Marquis reagent tests—a mix of of formaldehyde and sulfuric acid, which reacts with certain chemicals inside your drugs to produce a colour change.
To work out whether they are in fact helpful or not, I spoke to Guy Jones, the founder of Reagent Tests UK, and Harry Sumnall, a professor in Substance Use for the Public Health Institute.
And, as Guy Jones, technical lead at drug testing kit supplier Reagent Tests UK and senior scientist at drugs harm reduction NGO The Loop explains, drugs such as methamphetamine, crack cocaine and heroin are traditionally vaped anyway, albeit not through an electronic device.
"It really depends on how much light and moisture it's been exposed to, and what temperature it's been at," says Guy Jones, Technical Lead at Reagent Tests UK. "There's not really a formula where you can say, 'After X months it will lose 1percentt, and after Y months it will lose 2percentt,' because the conditions are so variable.
And what that means is that people who were using reagent tests to show if their stuff was a cathinone or MDMA can now no longer do that because when they are mixed together the only result they will get will tell them that their drug contains MDMA.
To find out what's going on in the mouths and brains of festival gremlins across the UK, I spoke to some experts who have spent the summer on the frontline: Katy MacLeod of 24-hour welfare providers Chill Welfare; Guy Jones, Senior Scientist at The Loop and Technical Lead of Reagent Tests UK; and Oliver Trafford, Lead Practitioner of the UK's first dedicated festival mental health response team.
So far, a range of accuracy measures have been reported for urine reagent tests and for circulating antigen tests.
In common with the Heine trial protocol [ 22], where daily glucose monitoring was not required for patients assigned to receive exenatide, the additional cost of one reagent tests strip and one lancet per day was applied.
