Checkmate: How The Loop brought drug checking to the UK

Common lore pegs 2016 as a societal cataclysm, but my Brexit summer was beautiful.

I followed the European Championships across France, sleeping on TGVs, meeting friends and sunrises in Paris, Marseille, St Etienne, Nice, filing copy from broiling Internet cafes that smelled of teeth, Vogue smoke on my skin. As the trip wound down, I received clandestine messages from Secret Garden Party about something important happening at that year’s festival. Eventually, we spoke on the phone and the source of the secrecy became clear: a charity called The Loop would be checking festivalgoers’ drugs, giving them the results, all with the approval of authorities.

In the decade since, the UK’s drug deaths have climbed to record levels, year-on-year. But The Loop now has four regular Home Office-approved drug checking services (DCS) in England, with at least six expected by the year’s end. Scotland should have three of its own before the hootenanny, while Wales has one.

Reaching the point where drug checking moves in from the fringes has been slower than many hoped, but that weekend on a febrile Cambridgeshire hill was the starting gun. We spoke to central characters from that weekend’s cast for their memories, what could have gone wrong, and its ongoing legacy for UK drug culture and harm reduction.

The Chemist

“I remember everyone being really boiling in that tent,” laughs Dr Henry Fisher, an Oxford-graduated chemistry PhD who volunteered for The Loop and now designs psychedelic trials with Clerkenwell Health.

The Loop’s canvas was just roughly 10m in diameter, but this arbitrary patch of turf became the UK’s first de facto decriminalised space for drug possession.

“We were almost having to pinch ourselves that this was happening,” Henry says. The novelty was also not lost on festival attendees. “People couldn’t believe the service was being offered. We had to reassure everyone that the police weren’t going to jump on them. But word got out that it was genuine, not a trap, then gradually interest grew,” he adds.

Punters took a small scoop of a powder or chunk of a pill, handed it over to a volunteer, from where it was subject to three types of forensic analysis. They then received feedback on its contents, alongside a general consultation involving harm reduction smarts.

The Loop knew that brevity was key in the sensory merry-go-round of the Great British carnival – particularly Secret Garden Party, which that year had a ‘Gardener’s Guide To The Galaxy” theme.

“We hadn’t quite worked out how the customer experience would work but everything needed to be as smooth as possible.” In future years the lab would be in a separate tent or portacabin but the team – comprising volunteer chemists and health professionals – were all together, analog, passing information back and forth, sometimes writing results on pen and paper rather than a streamlined online database that would come.

Whilst this weekend was The Loop’s first front-of-house drug testing event, they had been doing back-of-house (testing seized substances, offering welfare services and disseminating drug-related information to the public where necessary) since 2013. But its founder, Professor Fiona Measham, had been researching harm reduction and drugs through the lens of rave culture and British leisure time since the 1990s. It was a long road to Secret Garden Party, and for no party was it linear.

The Head Gardener

“When I first asked the Silver Commander about drug checking, it was a flat shutdown,” says Freddie Fellowes, Head Gardener of Secret Garden Party, which had its first event in 2004 and ended in 2022, when they ceremoniously cindered the festival’s main stage.

A Silver Commander [in this case Laura Hunt] is a senior police officer who works with festivals on strategy, logistics and security. Freddie says that the next time they spoke about drug checking, Laura’s mood had changed, the words etched on his memory.

“She said that the primary directive for the police force is the persecution of criminality. The secondary is protection of the vulnerable,” Freddie recalls. Hunt took the view that once punters were through the gates, the objective of protecting the vulnerable takes precedent. “I’d never heard that line from the police before. It was absolutely enlightening and a massive credit to her.”

Freddie recalls that support from within the festival community was eventually “overwhelming” but that he found backing hard to find closer to home, citing a budget meeting where the festival’s general manager said that the not-insignificant money slated for The Loop was untouchable ‘because Freddie wants it to happen.’

“I stopped the meeting and said that this wasn’t some fantasy project. Not only will it save lives but, if you want to be a bread head about it, it will reduce our blue lights [ambulance] cases. That will reduce all sorts of costs and friction we have as a commercial entity. So there was a money orientated argument for it too.”

His determination was perhaps aided by Secret Garden Party’s notoriety for a Sisyphus-inspired strain of British hedonism – which anyone that’s been in their 24-hour bar at 8 am will attest to. (A friend of mine memorably said that bar, that year, with everyone in their intergalactic outfits, the sun long come up, was like being in some fantastical purgatory.)

So, did Freddie ever worry about getting the call a festival owner dreads most?

“Of course. It [someone dying] was one of the things you never, ever, want to happen on your watch – whether it’s down to something you have or haven’t done,” he says, stating with pride that he never had to take such a call. “It [The Loop] was really important to me because it was about looking after each other, and doing all of this in a way that was sustainable.”

To that point, a common theme amongst interviewees was how the whole project, years in the making, would have been forever dashed if there’d been a tragedy that year – of all years. “There was definitely a moment of thinking, ‘It would be awful if the thing we’ve all trained for, disaster prepped for, occurred this year because it will look like it happened because we’re drug testing,” Freddie says. “And it didn’t matter how we dealt with it. We’d have that hanging around our necks.”

Fortunately, that concern was unmet.

The Advocate

The results from that first pilot were published in 2018. Amongst cases of pills containing concrete, ketamine sold as cocaine and the grim cathinone n-ethylpentylone moonlighting as MDMA, were some solid insights into how drug checking affects behaviours, even in the festival scrum.

Around 20% of drugs tested were not what the buyer thought. Around two-thirds of people who had been mis-sold drugs handed over further substances for disposal. In a damning indictment of the festival plug, drugs purchased onsite were more than twice as likely to have been mis-sold as those acquired offsite –with the users buying them on average two years younger.

2016 was a year of record drug-related and festival drug-related deaths across England and Wales. Despite this, Secret Garden Party saw one hospital admission for drugs in that year – down from 19 the previous year. Freddie’s aspiration came to pass.

The media largely lapped it up, thanks, in part, to some cloak-and-dagger PR led by Fiona which kept this seismic story under wraps for as long as possible. The Guardian didn’t run it until Sunday afternoon, and I was the only reporter onsite (for VICE). Fiona herself only gave an interview to Radio 4 ‘s Today show on Monday morning.

This clandestine approach was partly down to not wanting the service to become overwhelmed, plus a healthy scepticism about whether the service would actually go ahead with Fiona experiencing a number of false starts down the years – getting tantalisingly close before one of the stakeholders wobbled and the pilot pulled.

But this time no-one blinked. It wasn’t just the usual suspects that approved.

“There wasn’t the moral outrage response and the reaction – even amongst titles like Daily Mail and The Telegraph – was really positive,” says Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst of Transform, a charity consumed with the tricky task of ending the drug war, and one of The Loop’s most vocal supporters, who was onsite that weekend.
(For anyone who’s met Steve, “vocal” is an apt general descriptor.)

“Advocacy work can feel like shouting into the void so it was an emotional moment. Huge credit to Fiona,” Steve says, pointing to her framing The Loop’s work as an academic, public health exercise. “That shifted it from being indulgent and hedonistic or pro-drugs.”

Steve suggests that festivals are a fecund breeding ground for this kind of pilot as music, festival and drug cultures are so entangled. “Arguments that this testing facilitated drug use didn’t stack up.”

He also posits that “festivals are quite often white, privileged spaces,” with journalists covering this story possibly having family members at the festival – or attending themselves. “So I think there’s an understanding of that particular culture, as opposed to stigmatising and well-trodden media stereotypes like spice ‘zombies’ or shoplifting ‘junkies’.

While this criticism has been voiced – with Fiona herself acknowledging festivals as a “stepping stone” to drug checking for-all – Steve says, “The power of pragmatic advocacy is growing and I think that resistance to it is eroding fast. It rings hollow now with drug deaths going up and up.”

There were subsequent positive years of festival drug checking at festivals like Bestival, Boom Town and Kendal Calling – the latter of whom also worked with Fiona on that original 2016 pilot and only missed on being the “first” by virtue of coming the weekend after Secret Garden Party.

2018 saw 8,000 people get their drugs tested, though there was one setback when Festival Republic Managing Director Melvin Benn flip-flopped on a vow to have The Loop at Reading and Leeds. 2019 saw Boomtown’s service cancelled days before due to “ongoing legal complexities” and, from then, thanks to a combination of increased Home Office intervention and the Covid-19 epidemic, The Loop were no longer able to carry out public drug checking.

Yet drug deaths continued rising to record levels. Nevertheless, it was only in 2023 that the Home Office finally approved a license. A monthly Bristol service started the following January, though licensing stipulations ensured it was aimed more towards dependent drug users than ravers, weekend kitchen dwellers or festival goers.

This buffalo-through-treacle progress can seem maddening for those who see drug checking as no more egregious than a trip to the pharmacy. The Netherlands has been doing it for decades. Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal have long-established drug checking services, while drug consumption rooms have been operating across parts of Europe, Canada and Australia for years, stopping overdoses and connecting users with healthcare.

Is there something particular to Britain that makes it so averse to seemingly humane reforms with the potential to save lives?

The answer is byzantine. But Steve posits that, “We have a peculiar political culture – perhaps it harks back to some Victorian puritanism or colonial centralisation of power. Maybe the fact we’re an island. We’re divorced geographically and linguistically, we have a degree of separation from European culture and social policy debates. I think there is something unique about the confluence of puritanical traditionalism and conservatism and empire nostalgia. It spawned a gutlessness in social policy reform.”

The Slow Revolutionary

Perhaps it’s worth acknowledging here that, after a decade of reporting The Loop’s work, I can’t pretend to be an impartial observer.

Writing that feature at Secret Garden Party – having taken MDMA through the gates inside some Boots cucumber moisturiser to test the service – altered my career’s trajectory. I’d never really found my niche until then: my ‘thing’, a wagon to hitch myself to. Later that year I won Festival Journalist Of The Year, at the same awards The Loop and Secret Garden Party won a Festival Innovation Award. I stopped having to pitch.

The Loop has – and will – help thousands of people in way more profound ways than it helped me, but I’m still grateful I got invited to the show. And while my part began with a phone call in Nice, for Fiona it’s been years in production – an exercise in slow diplomacy, in which she is now assisted by The Loop’s CEO Katy Porter, not to mention the hundreds of volunteers who have given up their evenings, weekends and annual leave for the cause.

“That weekend felt like the beginning of a new era, that anything was possible,” Fiona says, in one of many emails we’ve shared over the last couple of months. “It felt like the first step in the right direction towards a more just, rational, compassionate and evidence-based drug policy.”

The Loop project actually traces back to 2010 when Fiona started an annual programme of research on festival drug use and behaviours called the English Festival Study. So, 16-odd years and infinitesimal conversations with stakeholders and journalists later, she’ll admit that, “Once the novelty wore off, it was hard work and, at times, quite a lonely place with my head above the parapet, trying to raise awareness and build public support for drug checking through the media and social media – as well as negotiating with stakeholders for 10 years solidly.”

Until the Home Office finally granted a formal license for drug checking, they’d been working with like-minded local players and forward-thinkers (such as Silver Commander Laura Hunt). The wheels of drug reform tend to turn first at a local level, alongside the gathering of data and tireless advocacy.

“Progress can come in stages and significant change probably rarely happens all at once — reform is a more realistic goal than revolution,” says Fiona.

That progress is now becoming stark. Most of the UK will have access to a DCS in 2026, with three due to open in Scotland by the end of the year. These are backed by the Scottish Government and won’t be run by The Loop, though Fiona has been sitting on advisory committees, nudging things along. Newport, Gwent has a DCS run by the alcohol and drug service Kaleidoscope. Bristol’s is still active. Then there’s bi-monthly services in Hackney and Camden, with Ealing due to open shortly.

“The problem with London is that all the boroughs will now be wanting one – but that isn’t efficient. At some point, public health authorities will need to get together and work out a format for London-wide services – maybe one in the north, south, east and west – opening for longer hours and more days.”

2016 might have been an annus horribilis for many: Brexit, Trump, the death of David Bowie and Prince, “all our heroes fading” like that Lorde song. But a slow revolution began in a field in Cambridgeshire.

“It was the beginning of a journey – but also the end of a different sort of advocacy journey,” says Steve Rolles. “What The Loop did in 2016 was break through the glass ceiling.”