Meet the woman who wants to revolutionise the UK's approach to club drugs

So police, local government and the dance music community has welcomed drugs testing, but how do we reach the stage where national government/Westminster accepts it too?

I think it will probably be a rolling stone really. I suspect we'll be doing testing at least seven festivals next summer, and then exponential growth after that. Because we're going to be writing guidelines that we recommend testing is included at festivals, there could become a case where it's a condition of the licence in future. So the anomaly would be festivals that don't have it. One of the reasons I put quite a lot of time and effort behind the scenes into introducing drug testing this summer to the UK was because I thought we could do it and the time was right. It's quite a brave decision by the police and events management to do that, and a great deal of trust in me which I'm honoured by. The times are changing; it's an excitement time for drug policy internationally. A lot of countries are thinking about doing things differently and following the evidence base. That's true in the UK now.

How else can we make taking drugs and going out safer for users?

The Loop also does harm reduction and welfare advice, and testing feeds into that. It's important that young people have got access to up-to-the-minute information about the drugs they may be taking. We also need to be funding better welfare and paramedics around and about in the night-time economy. I would also like to see funding of club drug clinics in all cities, which are open to everyone. Something like 56 Dean Street, which is a gay sexual health clinic that's really cool and funky. You can drop off samples without even meeting a human through a futuristic perspex chute. That would be great to replicate for clubbers.

Would implementing measures like sniffer dogs be helpful at all?

The previous fabric review [in 2014] was about ID scanners and sniffer dogs, and I was there giving expert evidence on what our understanding was of sniffer dogs. That wasn't the focus of the most recent review at all, and the reason why was the judge found in favour of me and the fact that on balance sniffer dogs cause more harm than good for a number of reasons. Firstly, private security firm sniffer dogs are really variable and whether or not they can sniff out drugs is a matter of debate. There's very woolly guidelines for private security firms in the UK and really one old man and a mutt can set one up. The other concern is that the existence of sniffer dogs on the door means that some people, particularly inexperienced users, might binge on the drugs before going in. And that pre-loading in itself can increase health related problems. That's the biggest concern: could it actually backfire and cause more problems?

What example do you think shutting down fabric sets to other clubs that are trying to implement harm reduction policies?

It is going to send shivers of concern right through the nightclub industry up and down the country that fabric can close when they seem to be a model of best practice. Fabric has the finances to resource that, so that must make other clubs feel vulnerable because they don't have the sort of money that fabric does. One of the reasons why fabric took the case to review about sniffer dogs last December was they felt they could afford to challenge this on the behalf of nightclubs more generally. Other nightclubs couldn't have the level of security of fabric in the club and at the door, it's an extraordinary level of security, and the layers of welfare and ratio of staff to customers is higher than almost any club.

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Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Intern. Follow him on Twitter