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

Fiona Measham is the Durham University professor at the heart of pushing UK drug policy into the 21st century. She’s the co-director of charity The Loop, an organisation which approaches drugs with a pragmatic outlook focusing on harm reduction and education. The charity's work and research promotes the safety of drug users, especially as the UK government continues to ignore the fact that recreational drug use is a very real part of our society.

As campaigns such as #CrushDabWait highlight, The Loop’s work exists to inform, not scaremonger, and the positive impact is already showing: it's become a trusted resource within the clubbing community and has potentially saved lives already. Through the testing Fiona does onsite at music events, The Loop is able to gather accurate and up-to-date information on substances and deliver tailor-made warnings when dangerous drugs are in circulation.

We caught up with Fiona in the days after the fabric ruling to discuss the steps that need to be taken to prevent drug deaths, protect night clubs and ensure going out is as safe as possible for UK residents.

Will drugs testing at clubs and festivals save lives?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that I think it's a bit more complicated. I was interested in doing the pilot this summer to find out the answer to that question myself. There's not a lot of evidence showing how it changes peoples' behaviour; we all know the risks from alcohol but plenty of people drink more than the recommended sensible consumption level.

We were really pleased with how the pilots went for a number of reasons. Firstly and most importantly, when we told people what was in their drugs, a quarter of them said they didn't want them and asked us to dispose of them. We did it at Secret Garden Party and Kendall Calling and interestingly it was similar at both festivals. They're very different festivals with different demographics, music policies and average ages. That in itself is heartening because obviously the British have a reputation for being caners around the world, but a quarter of people, once told what was in the drugs, don't want them. That shows a level of responsibility and productive engagement with harm reduction.

Testing behind the scenes also means we can address and identify any dealers who are misselling drugs onsite that could be potentially harmful. At Secret Garden Party there were people selling anti-malaria tablets as cocaine, and at Kendall Calling people were selling boric acid as cocaine. We were able to put out warnings to people on social media and explain dealers were misselling substances. Really that's win-win for everyone. The police are pleased because we're pulling the rug out from under the feet of dealers; paramedics onsite and NHS staff in hospitals are pleased because there's going to be less medical incidents and less pressure on NHS beds; and obviously drugs users themselves as well because they're not buying crap off dealers that they don't want. Testing like that is good news for everyone.

To give you another example from testing at the Warehouse Project, when the red Superman pills were circulated I said to them "can you put out a warning that they contain PMMA?". We were the first people to do that warning in the UK. Subsequently four people died in the South East/East Anglia/Midlands. Public Health England didn't put out a warning until after the deaths. As soon as people know what red Superman tablets contained no one will buy them because people don't want PMMA. The Netherlands put out the warning quick enough and nobody died there. In the UK the warning was put out late and four people died.

So, do I think testing will save lives? I think it can, and there's evidence that those sorts of warnings and information onsite and on social media can save lives, and it has in the Netherlands. In Zurich they do testing events and since they started that they've not had any deaths at all, I think that's in six years.

But there is a but, and I think that it's clubs aren't necessarily the best place to do testing. What I would like to see is pop-up testing in city centres in little pop-up Loop testing kiosks. It would be close enough to the clubs and early enough on in the evening so that people could get testing done before going into clubs. That would be more beneficial I think than when you go to a club, especially somewhere that's open late where people don't get there until after midnight. They'll have been to other places beforehand, maybe drinking, maybe taking drugs. It's less likely that they'll be able to productively engage with the testing and harm reduction information than if it's earlier in the night. And we know that people take drugs at live concert areas. A 17 year old girl died from MDMA crystal at the O2 arena in London just a few months ago, so we know that this isn't just a club problem. It's a drug problem. I think it would be good to have pop-up kiosks that all people can go to. That's my new plan and I'm waiting for a rich benefactor to fund it! The Loop is run by donations and volunteers. We need a national service that's available across the UK.

So Manchester police has allowed drugs testing at WHP. Will other police forces begin to follow and allow this?

Yes definitely. The police are really supportive and I've had at least five police forces approach me asking me to do testing at festivals. In fact, the idea for city centre pop-up kiosks came from a police officer who asked me to do it in their city centre. I was very surprised and disappointed at the fabric review with how relations have deteriorated between the club and the police. That's not my experience; I work very closely with the police all the time and they are so supportive of my drugs testing.

How can grass roots initiatives influence UK drugs policy?

Change is happening in the regions, and from the grassroots. It's not an accident I think that the most interesting experiment in cannabis decriminalisation is happening in Durham, which is about as far away from Westminster as you can get before Scotland. And the first festival to allow us to have their drugs tested and to have us tweet the results was at Kendal in the Lake District, which is similarly far away from Westminster. You have to ask why the most radical things are happening in relatively rural areas, compared to the great international metropolis of London. I think the answer has to be vested interests around politics and property. People can do things a bit differently away from the centre, and they are which is exciting.

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