Breaking good: Preventing overdoses at concerts

In an oversized field in upstate New York, Adam Auctor is on a mission: to hand out as many drug-testing kits as he can without being noticed by police or event security.

Auctor is at the Hudson Project, a new music festival in Saugerties, where throngs are moving to deafening electronic dance music and a pink tent is illuminated by flashing lasers.

Onstage is Conspirator, a band made up of members of the Disco Biscuits, the group that founded the nearby Camp Bisco, a music festival so notorious for substance abuse that it was canceled this year. Auctor, normally quiet and cautious, wends his way close to the front and, after waiting for the right moment, chucks a wad of stickers onto the stage. Hundreds of bits of paper saying “Bunk Police” flutter in the air to cheers from the crowd, as if it were a part of the set. Then he’s racing through the crowd, speeding past two security guards who are making a beeline to the front to see who’s causing the ruckus.

“If they didn’t know about us beforehand, they know us now,” Auctor says.

It’s a day in the life of Adam Auctor (not his real name) and the Bunk Police, a substance-testing organization mostly made up of volunteer festivalgoers that has become a leader in harm reduction on the summer music-festival scene. As overdoses, hospitalizations and arrests associated with adulterated substances at these venues have risen over the past decade, the Bunk Police has sold or given away hundreds of thousands of drug-testing kits to ensure that people doing drugs at festivals know exactly what they’re taking.

While fans have long been tripping on ecstasy while listening to their favorite bands, the serious consequences of taking substances that unbeknownst to them, have been cut with research chemicals, are entirely new. Research chemicals — new and not yet adequately tested for health risks — are routinely used to cut designer drugs such as Molly, LSD and Ketamine, resulting in higher profit margins for sellers. And taking adulterated products means a greater threat of overdose, which is what Auctor and his group are trying to prevent.

“Drugs like Molly are so popular at these events that it’s pretty well-known that no one is taking pure MDMA anymore,” says Tammy Anderson, an expert in adulterated substances at the University of Delaware. (MDMA, a synthetic, psychoactive drug, is short for 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, and is another word for ecstasy, or, recently, Molly). “Instead, they’re getting something that’s cut with multiple research chemicals.”

A wave of well-publicized overdoses at music festivals last year restarted dialogue and raised concern about the safety of festivalgoers. The federal Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act was first proposed more than a decade ago; in 2003, a very similar law, the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, was enacted, prohibiting venue owners and music promoters from managing or profiting from any location where they were aware of MDMA (Ecstasy) distribution, sales or use. But the lack of drug-safety awareness at music festivals today has left Auctor feeling that it’s up to him to demonstrate the importance of purity testing.

After seeking permission from several festival promoters to sell and distribute his drug-testing kits and getting no response, Auctor says, he took matters into his own hands, smuggling the test kits into festivals in a variety of creative ways, including bribing food-truck owners to hide the kits under their produce.

Now, he says, “We put them in black duffel bags and throw them over fences in the middle of the night. We do whatever it takes.” 

James Hall is an epidemiologist at the Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities in Miami and heads up the clinical research on drug abuse trends in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Hall says the crux of the problem on the music-festival scene is that the U.S. government has yet to educate the public that Molly, which is sold as pure MDMA, is rarely that. 

For festival promoters, safety precautions have been a concern. After the deaths last year, Electric Zoo put out a Molly-awareness video. Harm-reduction groups such as DanceSafe have also been allowed to provide information on the drug ecstasy. But Auctor says that existing safety precautions at music festivals aren’t enough. The Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation act held club owners and music festival promoters criminally responsible for any knowledge of drug use at their events. This has resulted in promoters shying away from drug-testing kits; their acknowledgment of the Bunk Police’s presence would mean that promoters are aware drugs are being used at their events, putting their assets in serious jeopardy of being seized by the government. Requests for comment from MCP Presents, the promoter that oversees the Hudson Project and other large-scale music festivals, were declined.

Sean Dunagan, a former intelligence analyst for the Drug Enforcement Agency and advocate for drug policy reform, blames the RAVE Act for the drug deaths. “If I were promoting a festival, I would rather have the Bunk Police there than have three people dead from overdoses,” he says. 

The premise of the kits, which can be purchased for $20 to $25 at an event or through online retailers such as Amazon, is simple. Take a minuscule amount of the powder from the substance and add a few drops of the liquid solution from the kit, which consists primarily of formaldehyde and sulfuric acid. After 10 to 15 seconds of shaking the mixture, the substance changes color. A color-coded chart provides the key. The kits can be used for anywhere between 50 to 100 separate uses. Bunk Police testing kits have found substances sold as pure MDMA to be entirely composed of or contain large amounts of bath salts, which can induce hallucinations and other, more serious reactions such as dehydration, the breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue and kidney failure.

The testing kits aren’t 100 percent accurate, and it’s sometimes difficult to identify the components in mixed drugs, which has Auctor researching a technique called thin-layer chromatography. The next generation of consumer testing kits is being developed inside a nondescript bungalow in the suburbs of Denver, Auctor’s home and the official headquarters of the Bunk Police. Downstairs is a makeshift laboratory resembling something from the early episodes of Breaking Bad.

“‘Breaking Good,’ not ‘Breaking Bad,’” Auctor says. 

Yet, the danger of distributing the kits is real. Auctor knows that by selling his kits and offering people an avenue for a safer, more informed high that he’s taking money out of the pockets of drug dealers. He worries that someone will stab, shoot or kidnap him or one of the group’s volunteers. And depending on the states where the kits are distributed, the Bunk Police can run into some legal gray areas. Though the kits are allowed under federal narcotic laws, paraphernalia laws vary across different states. In Ohio, California and North Carolina, for instance, the sale and distribution of kits becomes an offense once an illegal substance is mixed with the chemicals of the drug testing kit.

“It’s definitely a gray [legal] area, but [on-site testing] needs to be done,” Auctor says. “I feel like I have the tools to do it.”

As the bass booms, Auctor paces back and forth in the dark in the thin corridor between a wall of plastic portable potties and a chain-link fence, peeking outside the festival grounds every few minutes. He calls a member of his crew, warning that the security pat-downs have intensified in the past hour.

But there’s no trouble, and the single-use kits make it into the festival as stealthily as they were sneaked in. Now, walking into the tent with the loud beats and the lasers, Auctor has a garbage bag full of kits and a job to do.

“I have people tell me that I’ve saved hundreds of lives,” he says. “Just one would be enough.”