KnowYourStuffNZ does not test for purity. They test for presence of a substance, and that’s what they report. The misconception that KYSNZ tests for purity is apparently rife amongst both students and our own Critic staff members.
It may seem like a small difference (presence vs. purity), but to KnowYourStuffNZ, this difference comes with legal implications. Brin, who works for KYSNZ, told us that “Under the second version of the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill … all the information we provide has to be relatively perfect in terms of harm reduction. If we were to give the impression that we could tell you something about a sample that we can't actually tell you, that could get us in trouble”.
This means that KYSNZ can only tell you if the sample you have has a substance in it. Depending on the sample, their FTIR spectrometer can tell you how much of a substance is in the sample along with any other fillers, binders, colours, or whatever else is in the sample holding it together. However, given the level of contaminants and the standard of the ingredients used in the labs used to make drugs for the illicit market, there’s no way the FTIR spectrometers can tell the ‘purity’ level.
It’s a bit like the difference between telling the difference - by taste alone - between top shelf fancy vodka in a posh bar and the vodka you’ve got brewing under the sink. The machine would taste both vodka samples, and say ‘yep, it’s got vodka in it’. But there’s obviously a marked difference between the vodkas.
“I did not know that”, said Maggie, a student who has used KYSNZ before. “Yeah, more students should be aware of that, but I assume that information is available”, she said. “People just don't necessarily research before they rock up. I also assume the staff probably tell you when you get your test done, maybe it’s just a slight miscommunication. When you’re familiar with the process it’s easy to forget that [the difference between presence and purity] is a technical thing for a lot of people. Making it really clear, in Layman’s terms, is really important for anything like that. Medical, safety in general, it needs to be easy to understand”.
This misconception does not impact, in any way, your ability to get your drugs tested. It just means that when a KYSNZ staff member says “we detected MDMA”, they are not telling you “that’s some really good shit you got there man, that’s some pure MDMA if I’ve ever seen it”. They can’t test for that. That’s not how it works. What they are saying is that they’ve found MDMA in your sample.
When they tell you that they detected MDMA, they’re not saying that your drugs are pure. Brin said that “We are never excluding the presence of anything else, but we can say that we didn't detect the presence of anything else. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any traces of something else in there, just that our machine didn’t see it with the limited window that it had access to.”
“Being able to tell you if there are different compounds is really important, like the mix of MDMA and ketamine that we discovered during O-Week”, said Brin. “If someone is expecting to only feel the effects of MDMA, and they don’t know that there’s ketamine in there as well, that could actually put them in danger. Ketamine mixes really poorly with a lot of other substances, particularly alcohol”.
Brin said that the misconception presents KYSNZ with a bit of an obstacle. “We are a reliable, trustworthy health service, but people are misunderstanding what we’re saying and it isn’t helping. And while this misconception is really just a difference between two similar words, the implication on our end is far greater. The risk of that misunderstanding is not only on our end, but on the client’s end as well. We never want someone to go away being less informed because communication doesn’t work. We don’t want people gaining false impressions about what is in their hand.”