Written at the close of the NSW Drug Checking Trial, Drug Checking Lead Clancy reflects on their time in the role. Drawing on a year of insight they ask a deceptively simple question: if most harm reduction happens invisibly, in communities, without any professional input at all, what are we actually measuring when we evaluate the services we can see?

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.

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.

The long-awaited NSW Drug Summit has finally taken place, and NUAA (the organisation that publishes Users News) worked hard to make sure that voices of people with lived and living experience of illicit drug use were represented. While we won’t see the government’s final recommendations until early 2025, on December 19 NSW Premier Chris Minns announced a welcome step in the right direction — drug sample testing at festivals.

Amid the rolling waves of psy trance dugga-dugga-dugga at Dragon Dreaming Festival, an anonymous community member roamed the crowd, testing people’s drugs under the radar. Undertaken with home reagent testing kits, it wasn’t a legal venture. Users News spoke to this harm reduction crusader about why they chose to test punters’ drugs and what they discovered

NUAA and NDARC have collaborated on research asking how people engage with drug alerts. The results show – what we already knew - that drug alerts are making us safer.

ACT’s new pill testing service, called CanTEST Health and Drug Checking Service, has opened, and Users News got the low-down from Chris Gough, who is the Executive Director (ED) of ACT’s Drug User Organisation (DUO), Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation & Advocacy (CAHMA). Chris is one of the peers who has played an important role in getting the service running.

Peer expert Oat gets us started on the basics to introduce a UN-exclusive series of resources and articles on pill testing.