First, the bad news: the situation with Erowid’s DrugsData drug checking project is similar to what it was a year ago. The good news: we’re enlisting additional help to submit a new application to restart the project.
The recap: After 23 years of continuous operation as a mail-in anonymous drug testing service, the DEA ordered our project to discontinue testing anonymous samples and cease testing for the ongoing research project we’re engaged in (with Brandeis University, Chicago Recovery Alliance, and several DEA-licensed partners) to perform secondary analysis for on-site technologies such as FTIR and immunoassay test strips. This research has been part of nationwide efforts to standardize the way harm reduction-aligned labs do their testing and to shed light on the ever-changing illicit drug supplies and inform harm-reduction efforts.
We are re-applying again for renewal of our “exception” to FR 1974 Feb 28 21 CFR part 1305 : See our OCRd version of the original regulation. In 1974, the DEA published a rule that essentially made all anonymous testing of controlled substances illegal. The DEA sometimes offers exemptions from this rule for short periods or for specific research projects, though we have been unable to find any list of such exemptions. The only long-standing exception we can verify is that of Erowid’s partner lab, first approved in 1989 and then twice reapproved since: once in 2001 when DrugsData began operations (as “EcstasyData”) and again in 2016 when the lab’s ownership changed hands.
The reason this exception is important is that there is no other legal way to get illegal controlled substances from the end user to a legal testing facility without someone committing a trackable federal criminal offense somewhere in the process. It’s a type of “last mile” problem. There’s a gulf in the law, as written, where a person who possesses a possible controlled substance can’t get it tested without being identified as an illegal drug user; have their desire to know what is in the drug be a pretext for a search or investigation; or worse, be charged with a criminal offense for simply wanting to know what is in their drugs.
No explanation was given, other than a low-level DEA representative telling us by phone in July 2024 that “[My superiors] tell me they have no record of why the exemption was originally given, so we have to figure this all from scratch.” We were, at the time, reasonably happy with that response since we agree that the DEA should have a clear process to approve anonymous testing; have an approved set of handling and record-keeping practices; and clear limits on how such an exception is and is not used.
There should be a new rule or official procedure for how a person with a possible street opioid, or MDMA tablet, or other illicit or grey-market drug material can legally and without fear of backlash get that sample to an expert who can tell them what’s in it.
Though Erowid believed that we were following both the spirit and letter of the exemption, in 2001, the DEA supervisor for our partner lab explicitly told them not to share the text of the exemption letter with Erowid/DrugsData. So we operated as carefully as we could without knowing the actual rules we were to follow. It’s a dumb Catch-22.
So, what we’ve been doing since the cold stop in April 2024:
We continue to participate in a lab working group that consults on analytical methods, new drugs, adulterants, and by-products appearing in the drug supply; compares how labs report their findings; and shares knowledge and procedures with labs that are new to harm reduction-oriented analysis.
Though other labs report quantitative, the methods for doing that quantitation are complicated and differ from each other in important ways. Erowid’s DrugsData is disallowed from providing quantitative results under our previous exemption.
One of the complications in standardizing reporting between expert labs is that labs don’t have identical intake procedures, machinery setups, processes, solvents, etc. For instance, Erowid’s partner lab primarily uses two nearly identical Agilent GC/MS machines that operate 24/7 and samples are often tested 2-4 times. We usually start by taking a small amount of the submitted sample and attempting to dissolve it in anhydrous methanol. Different methods are used based on the chemicals expected in the sample. Some labs don’t have time to analyze a single sample multiple times and many use different equipment such as LC-MS, NMR, HPLC, or TQ-MS.
Erowid also participates in and promotes the fabulous work of the Alliance for Collaborative Drug Checking, founded in 2019 to support and bring together harm reduction groups doing drug checking.
We’ll provide more updates soon, but wanted to give a basic description and update of the status of this important project.
P.S. The results for the nine-photo “9-block” set of samples shown above and tested by DrugsData were:
- Daffy Duck—represented as: 1P-LSD (is 1P-LSD)—Online, Spain
- Red Bull—represented as: MDMA (is MDMA)—New York, NY
- White Powder—represented as: ibogaine; (is 2-fluoro-2-oxo-PCE)—Online
- Route 66—represented as: MDMA (is caffeine, methamphetamine)—Los Angeles, CA
- White Crystalline Powder—represented as: ketamine (is ketamine, ket precursor A)—New York, NY
- Baby Yoda—represented as: ecstasy (is MDMA, bk-EBDB)—Boston, MA
- White Capsule—represented as: mescaline (is mescaline)—Salt Lake City, UT
- Blue Punisher—represented as: MDMA (is MDMA, methylsulfonylmethane)—New York, NY
- Multicolor Blotter- “Goblin Bomb (Iris)” represented as: LSD (is LSD)—Online.