I am aware, in passing, of the purity of club drugs. I mean, theoretically. Totally in the abstract, in case you’re a DEA plant.
It heavily depends on what, and where. In my…research…
Street-level opiates? I honestly have no idea, besides what I hear in the media. Not my bag.
Cocaine? It’s rare, but it happens, and it seems to be ramping up in scale, unfortunately. And more realistically, it’s contaminated with significant amounts of filler, including lidocaine to give you that mouth tingle.
Ketamine? Nah. Either pretty darn pure, or just cut with filler. (Well…mostly nah, I am pretty sure a friend got some cut with PCP one time.)
Ecstasy/molly (which is such a semantic jumble): rare, but it happens. But more likely, instead of the MDMA you want, it’s MDA, or some other substituted phenethylamine…or just sucrose as filler, and it does nothing at all.
Other more obscure club drugs, such as the stuff people claim is 2C-B? Rare, but plausible, and there was a rash of that in California recently.
Addiction is a powerful compulsion, but so is safety: an addict (or someone who isn't yet an addict) might choose not to use a particular batch if they have access to test strips. Even if they do choose to use: access to test strips allows them to plan for other harm reduction activities.
And surely it's useful to provide tools to those not yet fully down the addiction path?
My drug awareness extends little beyond watching The Wire, but I'd guess users might test before purchasing or be more likely to work with dealers who would accommodate testing. In theory, at least.
It's all a multi-faceted problem and providing tools seems smart to me. It's remotely akin to being distressed about abortion but not keen on sex education or providing birth control. Attack the issues from all angles.
I'm not saying this is the reason, but out of curiosity: does Australia's drug agency/agencies place as strong of an emphasis on border interdiction? A large part of the US's drug policy emphasizes "flashy" seizures of large amounts of drugs at the border, which has incentivized smugglers to pursue more potent (and therefore more compact) alternatives.
On darknet markets there's a pretty big markup on product sold within Australia compared to what you could get from Europe. I always assumed it was because if you ordered the Europe stuff there was a much higher chance of it not showing up. We also don't share a lengthy land border with a country partially run by cartels.
So I would be shocked if it was anywhere near as easy to get drugs in to Australia as it is the US, let alone easier.
My information on the scene is extremely out of date, but 10 years ago it was more common for users to get some prescription morphine and convert it to heroin themselves. There was also a pretty big market for illicit acetic acid because of this, too.
This was because importation was difficult, making any imported product vastly more expensive than what you could make yourself.
Thank you, I'm aware of that. That has very little bearing on whether there's a policy of border interdiction or not, since borders include things like ports and international airports.
Very much possible. Non street level dealers tend to prefer repeat customers vs large volume of random people. Because of that they tend to monitor quality of their own products. I've met dealers who go as far as actually wash the product. Funny enough, the only time I bought from a random guy, I got baking soda instead.
As a casual outside observer I thought no. In which case test strips are less useful