Across the globe music festivals will be taking place over the following months with thousands of people in attendance. Whatever festival anyone decides to visit they will run into familiar features of each event, the culture of these festivals differ depending on their music genre but many things do stay the same. For example, the feeling of community, a refreshing music experience in the wilderness, nightmarish portable toilets and the high possibility of encountering drugs.

The reality of it is that drugs will be circling these festivals, whatever police bans get put in place and whether or not testing stalls get approved. Substances always end up slipping through the net when people are searched at gates and they will always be available for purchase inside. Many won't run the risk of taking their own drugs in due to possibility of getting caught and not allowed to enter the festival so decide to try and buy some inside. For many this is an easier solution than trying to hide them from security as it poses less risk of them getting caught and their weekend having a premature end. Substances are usually pretty easy to find too if you know where to look, so it's not hard to see why many users choose this method, but are drugs sourced this way really safe to be taking?

The issue with festival goers buying drugs once admitted is that they more than likely will not know the person they get them from. Therefore they cannot guarantee the drugs purity, know its contents are safe or even base a safe dose on usage history. It becomes a very risky guessing game, essentially like playing with fire when it comes to their safety. On top of this there is the large possibility that they will get ripped off paying a high price for a substitute substance that has absolutely no resemblance in effect or ingredients to what they were hoping to buy. To be sure they would need to use some kind of drug testing kit, pieces of equipment that are also usually banned inside festivals unless concealed properly.

A perfect example of this uncertainty is a recent event at US festival Bonnaroo. Where a man walked around the festival openly selling drugs, that turned out to be fake. The only reason these drugs were found to be counterfeit was because this man was arrested, not because his customers were aware of the issue. He was found to have a great number of fake drugs in large quantities such as ecstasy pills, LSD, cocaine, mushrooms and an incense stick made to look like black tar heroin, all of which had no trace of their labelled drug. Unknown products like this can do great harm, it's better to be safe than put these things in your body as a risk. If you know someone who is definitely planning to take drugs at a festival this year, be sure they are safe and get them to use a source they trust and always test what they have in their possession to save them from being fooled with counterfeit substances and unwanted side effects.