Read on Twitter
Thank you Gary for highlighting this truly fantastical take on the bill permitting drug-checking services to operate. I guess it's worth going through this nonsense, so read on ... https://twitter.com/testtubeone/status/1334732337515356162
AMB-FUBINACA is one of the two synthetic compounds associated with nearly all critical overdoses and deaths from "synnies" in recent years. I think I'm correct in saying it is virtually never reported in data from services like @KnowYourStuffNZ
The main reason for that is that these drugs simply aren't presented to festival drug-checking services. In four years' worth of testing, Know Your Stuff has reported *one* result containing a synthetic cannabinoid – 5F-MDMB_PINACA. https://knowyourstuff.nz/our-results-2/testing-results/testing-reports/2019-2020-testing-report/
I am extremely confident that the sample containing 5F-MDMB_PINACA was "not as presumed" – that it was *sold as something else*. The synthetic wasn't the desired drug, it was a dangerous contaminant picked up in testing. That's why drug-checking services exist.
Simeon Brown's fever-dream about someone bringing in AMB-FUBINACA for confirmation – then taking it – is dangerously absurd. Synthetic cannabinoids very rarely reach users in their original powder form: they're dissolved in acetone and sprayed on plant matter.
It's difficult-to-impossible to identify chemicals in plant matter with field testing equipment. This doesn't matter because *synnies are never presented for checking*. The people using them aren't middle-class party kids practising harm reduction.
They're typically very marginalised, vulnerable communities who buy synnies because they're cheap and strong. They don't know what they're getting. No one says "I got my AMB-FUBINACA tested and it turned out to be 5F-MDMB_PINACA!"
There is a role for reporting as harm reduction in that world, but it generally doesn't involve field testing. It relies on quickly disseminating reports of a "bad batch" of synnies (which typically means "badly dosed") as a warning to others. That's life-saving information.
There's more crazy bullshit from Simeon Brown and Nick Smith in the transcript above. But the key point is that they're opposing testing that protects people from inadvertently ingesting very dangerous substances, such as the synthetic cannabinoids they claim to be worried about.
