With everything else going on, you might not have heard much about the opioid crisis in recent months, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away – if anything, the crisis has only intensified. COVID-19 has forced services to close their doors and sent international supply chains into a tailspin, making people who use heroin and other opioids more vulnerable than ever.

As we discussed in our recent article, a significant part of that crisis in many areas is the ubiquity of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, in drugs that are sold as heroin, Oxy and others. For example, some services in Canada have reported that anywhere from 50-90% of samples they test have been contaminated.
We’ve been racking our brains to come up with some small way we can contribute, and we think we’ve hit upon something: any time you place an order with us, we’ll include a free set of fentanyl test strips.

These strips have become the industry standard in quick, reliable detection of fentanyl in a sample, and we started carrying them when we first started to distribute in North America, where the risk of fentanyl is at its highest.
We understand that the majority of our customers aren’t opioid users so these may not be of any interest to you personally, but fentanyl has been known to appear in other substances so it’s still worth checking, particularly if you are in a high-risk area. Even if you’re not worried at all, there may be others in your community for whom tests like these could be a matter of life and death – if you know anyone who may be at risk, you can simply pass your strips along to them.

If you’re using your strips or sharing them with people in your community, we want to hear about it! Contact us directly or let us know over social media – that way we can have a little more confidence that these strips are seeing good use. Further, if you know any organisations in your area that could benefit from testing strips (needle exchanges, supervised consumption facilities or others), please help us get in touch with them – we’re always looking for new and more targeted ways to help keep our communities safer.