Including people with lived and living experience in harm reduction services is an essential component to any interventions’ success, and drug checking is no exception. Mountainside Harm Reduction Society is an entirely peer-led organization that employs people with lived experience, or ‘peer workers’, to deliver low-barrier harm reduction services like

Summer time in British Columbia means the start of music festival season and one of the busiest times of year for drug checking. There were 735 samples checked at Bass Coast alone this year, according to the data collected in the database maintained by the BC Centre on Substance Use.

In a job that’s part outreach, part technical, drug checking technicians play a pivotal role in community harm reduction. Community drug checking services started being offered in 2017 in response to the ongoing toxic drug crisis. Many community drug checking services in BC use a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer in combination