Drugs testing by The Loop

[mtbc]

At the end of last week was the Secret Garden Party at which a charity offered testing of illegal drugs: basically, one waits a little while for them to run a sample through the spectrometer, then they let one know what they found and one can decide if one wants to keep the drugs.

I entertain misgivings about this service: surely a strong disincentive to taking such drugs at all is the risk of the supply chain's poor quality control, especially at a festival where its transience must decrease dealers' concern about the spread of bad reviews. Don't such testing services encourage people to try taking drugs at all? Further, people are notoriously poor at judging risks like, well, the last couple I had tested were good, so this probably is too.

I've been wrong about other things though: I had not expected the UK's ban on retailers selling large quantities of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to work as well as it has because I had guessed that the suicidal would have already ideated enough to have accumulated plenty of stock.