If you’re at a music festival in Australia and police are patrolling with drug sniffer dogs, you know you’re in NSW. On Monday, May 5, the NSW Supreme Court began hearing a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 3000 festival goers over unlawful strip searches between 2016 and 2022.
[CW: sexual assault; descriptions of invasive police searches]

I went from the kid who could do no wrong to the black sheep of the family. At 17, I was crying in bed, deep in cannabis withdrawal. To my parents, I’d become a stranger, someone they thought might steal their wedding rings for a gram of bud.

In NSW, drug driving recently became the second leading cause of deaths on the road, surpassing fatigue, drink driving and non-seatbelt use. Getting behind the wheel of a vehicle high on anything is generally a dangerous idea. But this issue is even more serious when it comes to benzos.

Benzodiazepines, aka benzos, are exploding in popularity, especially among young people in Australia. But people aren’t just sourcing their benzos from people with prescriptions, there’s a huge fake benzo markets with frequent quality control issues. It’s an underground subculture filled with unmarked cliff edges and landslides. So just how do you navigate it safely?

At Yours & Owls festival in Wollongong, you may have noticed a unique service hidden away inside a white tent, a safe space where punters could discuss their drug use history and intentions. This was NSW’s first festival drug checking service. But, as with any new harm reduction service, people naturally raise a number of concerns. Users News is here to provide the answers.

Users News chat to a peer about all things DMT. From vaping DMT and launching into another dimension to smoking changa, this is your guide on what to expect with one of the world’s strongest psychedelics.

We already know so much about what doctors, researchers and policy-makers believe about ice but we rarely read firsthand accounts from people who use amphetamines. We also rarely read articles that go beyond the usual media narratives and binary logic of good/bad, medical/recreational, therapeutic/harmful and soft/hard drugs. Consider this article a correction of that trend.

In a first for NSW, NUAA, the organisation that publishes Users News, will be teaming up with NSW Health to provide a drug checking service at the Yours & Owls festival in Wollongong on the March 1-2 weekend. NUAA will be providing peer support to help festival goers navigate the new service with zero judgment.

Data suggests that a high proportion of people with ADHD use meth. But why is this? Users News chats to ADHD peers who have self-medicated with meth to find out why so many ADHD folks gravitate towards illegal amphetamines and why this behaviour often contradicts the stigmatising stories about meth we see in mainstream media.