Because the social service suppliers handed out fruit snacks and water bottles on Thursday, down the block from a needle trade on Berkeley’s College Avenue, they requested passers-by an uncommon query: Did they wish to “check” their medication?
Naila Vitatoe defined the operation to a middle-aged man. She works for an Oakland nonprofit that analyzes avenue medication for undesirable chemical compounds — a splash of fentanyl in a bag of tar heroin, for example, or an rising industrial chemical that sears the veins of customers.
Vitatoe and her colleagues take a small pattern and take a look at it with a machine that beams infrared mild. Inside minutes, they return the drug to the person, together with details about its true contents and security recommendation — all freed from cost.
The man left and reappeared 5 minutes later with a small shard of methamphetamine for checking.
Drug checking is a public well being technique that California is leaning into increasingly as overdose deaths proceed to plague the area. The method is rooted within the precept of hurt discount. Analysis means that drug customers make extra knowledgeable choices and behave extra safely in the event that they’re empowered with information of what’s truly within the medication they’re utilizing. Proponents say this data will be the distinction between a person residing lengthy sufficient to achieve restoration or changing into one other statistic of the overdose disaster.
“I’m a strong believer in them,” Daniel Ciccarone, a professor in the united states Faculty of Medication who research drug use, mentioned of checking applications. “Knowledge is power.”
The drug provide is consistently evolving on the whims of drug traffickers. Unbeknownst to customers, their sellers might add artificial opiates, analysis chemical compounds, components and adulterants to luggage of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine. Xylazine, a tranquilizer utilized by veterinarians, is showing on the streets.
“That’s where it really shines for the conscientious consumer,” Ciccarone mentioned, “is to bring their meth in and say, ‘Hey, I felt unusually sleepy when I used this.’ And then, lo and behold, they find that there’s fentanyl in it.”
And within the U.S., which doesn’t have a unified system for monitoring modifications within the drug provide, checking applications present much-needed knowledge. Like others, the Oakland nonprofit sends drug samples for affirmation to a Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how lab in Maryland.
Samples of drug testing strips utilized by drug checking technicians on the HEPPAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
Drug checking technician Aron Lazaro makes use of a fentanyl take a look at strip throughout demonstrations with a vitamin C substance on the HEPAAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
HEPPAC Government Director Braunz Courtney stands outdoors the HEPPAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
HEPPAC Government Director Braunz Courtney exhibits drug testing kits offered to drug customers at no cost on the HEPPAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
HEPPAC Government Director Braunz Courtney exhibits a mural depicting the historical past of the nonprofit on the HEPPAC constructing in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
Present Caption1 of 5Samples of drug testing strips utilized by drug checking technicians on the HEPPAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
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The Oakland-based nonprofit is the HIV Schooling and Prevention Undertaking of Alameda County. Workers launched their drug checking program in 2023. Comparable operations have sprung up in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in different U.S. cities. In 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a legislation that protects employees in drug checking applications from arrest and legal prosecution. Police associations opposed it, saying it could empower drug sellers to enhance their product.
“Our job is to normalize this and standardize it, so that it just becomes a normal thing in the next five years,” mentioned Braunz Courtney, the Oakland nonprofit’s government director. “If not sooner.”
Courtney mentioned drug checking is “a natural progression for harm reduction.” The group, based mostly in East Oakland, has future a syringe trade. Its employees distribute naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal medicine — plus smoking kits and fentanyl take a look at strips. Courtney and his employees are staunch believers in these methods, which curb illness transmission and overdoses.
He additionally is aware of they will spur fierce opposition. For many years, critics have mentioned these practices encourage drug use that’s inherently dangerous.
In 2000, the nonprofit’s Fruitvale workplaces burned down in an act of arson. The group had already endured a number of prosecutions for possessing and distributing drug paraphernalia. However in an indication of fixing occasions, Courtney mentioned the drug checking program isn’t controversial in Oakland, and his employees rolled it out with out interference from police or ideological opponents.
On Thursday, the middle-aged man handed his meth to drug checking technician Enzo Dominguez. He positioned the pea-sized shard onto a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer. It’s an unassuming grey system that matches on a desk within the nonprofit’s Winnebago van, which travels all through Oakland and Berkeley to ship drug checking providers.
Drug checking technician Enzo Dominguez exhibits the outcomes of a vitamin C substance after testing it in an infrared spectrometer on the HEPPAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
Vitatoe and Dominguez are educated and accredited to make use of the system. Utilizing infrared mild, the spectrometer measures how a lot radiation is absorbed by the pattern and the way a lot passes by means of. The technicians use software program to visualise the outcomes, giving clues into the chemistry of the pattern.
Dominguez in contrast the brand new spectroscopy to a benchmark measurement of meth.
“This is pure meth,” he mentioned. The take a look at confirmed nothing surprising, no crimson flags that it is extra harmful to make use of.
Dominguez knowledgeable the person and handed him again the pattern. The person took a cupcake and promised to be again subsequent week.
With testing, employees often uncover one thing surprising. They’ve revealed {that a} counterfeit Xanax tablet included a benzodiazepine that’s not accredited for medical use and helped gas a wave of overdoses in San Francisco. They’ve discovered potent fentanyl in heroin, which is of weaker power. They’ve found a harmful bag of uncut fentanyl — a “crazy” sight, Vitatoe mentioned.
Once they make such discoveries, they are saying they offer their purchasers recommendation: Don’t use alone, carry Narcan, and begin small. Possibly they need to change sellers or carry testing strips. Generally, customers discard their medication, Dominguez mentioned. Others don’t.
Analysis means that this method is useful to public well being. A 2021 meta-analysis of analysis on 90 drug checking applications internationally, together with 9 research within the U.S., discovered proof that drug customers behave extra safely after they know one thing surprising is of their medication.
A 2018 examine of drug checking at a supervised injection website in Vancouver, Canada, the place heroin was the drug of alternative, discovered that a couple of third of customers deliberate to cut back their drug dose after testing revealed the presence of fentanyl. About 10% of these customers deliberate to trash their pattern. Researchers urged that the speed wasn’t greater as a result of the customers might need sought out fentanyl within the first place, or maybe they couldn’t discover medication with out fentanyl in any respect.
Keith Humphreys, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who’s an skilled on drug use, famous that dynamic.
The worth of drug checking is “pretty small when fentanyl is in almost everything,” he mentioned in an e mail, “and also a number of people are going to use whatever they have no matter the test result.”
However Ciccarone, of UCSF, threw chilly water on that concept. Fentanyl is widespread within the Bay Space, he mentioned, however it’s a “myth” that the highly effective opiate is in each drug. The drug checking technicians agree.
“Our results definitely do confirm that there is not fentanyl in everything,” Dominguez mentioned.
Drug checking technicians maintain data on totally different sorts of drug samples collected from drug customers on the HEPAAC workplace in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. HEPPAC gives free drug testing for customers to verify for undesirable chemical compounds of their medication of alternative. After testing, they return the medication and supply customers with data on purity percentages and security recommendation. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
