Regardless of whether individual music lovers choose to participate or not, illegal drugs have always been prevalent in the live music scene. The band that started the jam scene as we know it, the Grateful Dead, rose to prominence as the house band for the infamous Acid Tests of the 1960s, and their soundman, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, was the first individual to manufacture LSD for the masses.

However, times have changed since the ’60s, and in the decades since, new drugs have been introduced into the mainstream consciousness, from the cocaine-fueled discos of the ’70s to the ecstasy-powered warehouse raves of the ’90s. Now, we live in a time where drugs are more accessible than ever. New designer drugs are constantly being developed, manufactured, and imported into the United States, while new user-based technologies, such as the Dark Web, have facilitated easy access to pretty much any substance under the sun for the computer-savvy.

Recently, we’ve watched the rise of fentanyl, an opioid 100 times stronger than heroin, make its way around the music scene, tragically causing overdoses and deaths across the country. Not just music fans have been affected by its rise, as numerous musicians have similarly overdosed on the substance, including Tom Petty and Prince, both of whom presumably believed they were taking a more traditional painkiller that was actually laced with the absurdly strong additive.

Especially with the laissez-faire drug culture surrounding the live music scene—and specifically music festivals, where strangers can go tent-to-tent selling illegal substances and then easily disappearing—now, it is more important than ever before to test drugs, should you choose to consume them, and ensure that you know what you’re taking.

Luckily, The Bunk Police have been doing this work for nearly a decade, providing music lovers with drug testing kits so that fans can understand what they’re actually putting into their bodies. However, the work is not always easy, given that The Bunk Police and other harm-reduction organizations frequently face pushback from event promoters who don’t want their festivals to be seen as “drug” events. Given this, The Bunk Police often work under the radar, sneaking their materials into festivals and running more covert operations, as, in their eyes, not attending or being unable to offer people these kits is an issue of public safety.

Live For Live Music got the chance to speak to The Bunk Police’s founder and CEO, Adam Auctor. During our conversation, he gave us the lowdown on the organization’s newly launched Bunkbot, a texting service that gives subscribers drug-purity and personnel-location updates at major music festivals around the country, including Ultra, Camp Bisco, Electric Forest, Bonnaroo, Lost Lands, Burning Man, and, at the end of the month, Suwannee Hulaween. We also discussed the rise of fentanyl, how music lovers can protect themselves, and what we—as fans, voters, and musicians—need to do to make harm-reduction a priority at music events.

Read the full interview below, and head here for more information or to purchase test kits from The Bunk Police.

Ming Lee Newcomb: First of all, for those unfamiliar, what is The Bunk Police, and what do you guys do?

Adam Auctor: The Bunk Police manufactures and researches test kits for detecting adulterated substances and illegal drugs. We also distribute these test kits at events nationwide and, to some extent, globally. A lot of times, we do this without the permission of the event themselves.

MLN: Why is this mission important?

AA: Oh my gosh. Well, just as we’ve seen at Lost Lands, people are dying because of adulterated substances. These test kits are incredibly capable, especially at detecting certain substances like fentanyl. With that information, people can make better decisions.

The Bunk Police Mini-Documentary

[Video: Newsy]

Ming Lee Newcomb: I’ve seen reports of The Bunk Police and other services like yours, such as DanceSafe, being kicked out of events and festivals. Can you talk a little bit about this, and why that happens?

Adam Auctor: Sure. DanceSafe has been shut down at one event, but they haven’t been kicked out of any. We work very closely with them and during events that they are refused entry to—they apply and are either ignored or refused. We will attend the same events, sneak test kits in, and do the work anyways. We’ve been shut down at well over a dozen events over the years, and many of those were in the last year. Electric Forest shut us down in 2017 both weekends. This year, we were shut down at Okeechobee and Bonnaroo and were confronted at Lost Lands, as well. I think I’m forgetting one. It’s a pretty common occurrence for us. It’s really just to be expected at this point.

What we’re trying to do is force a change. If events aren’t willing to listen to somebody that’s asking for permission, then maybe they’re willing to change their minds once they see what’s going on at their events. So, we’re recording a lot of these results, and we have plans to publish a lot of these results in the next year.

MLN: Given that it seems you have to sneak into events or fly under the radar, if people are at a festival and they want to find you, how would they do that?

AA: Well, in the past, we’ve relied on signage and also a large pink parachute tent we’ve branded so that people know to look for it. This year, we have this system called Bunkbot, which allows people to sign up in advance for events and get location updates. Through that system, when we set up, we’ll post the location and text all of them. Then, if we’re shut down, we have a secondary location that’s ready to open up right afterward, and we’ll text them that location.

Beyond that, Bunkbot is also capable of receiving reports of adulterated substances, so people can text it with a picture of the substance, a description of the dealer, what they were trying to buy, and what the test results said. We’ll do a couple of things with that information. We’ll post it to our subreddit, r/bunkbot, for discussion and evaluation by the community. If it’s something really serious—for instance, fentanyl—we will text the people that have signed up for Bunkbot at that event.

This happened at Electric Forest. We sent an alert about adulterated cocaine that had fentanyl in it. The same thing happened at Camp Bisco. And then the same thing happened, as well, at Lost Lands this past weekend. We sent out an alert to a little over a thousand people at that event.

MLN: How much planning goes into each time that you go to a festival, and how many people are involved at each festival?

AA: Well, it’s a lot of planning. This is my full-time job, and we also have several other full-time employees and people that work part-time on this stuff. I don’t know how to quantify that for you, but it’s a lot. As far as the people that we bring to events, it depends on the event’s size, demographics, and location. At really small events—we’re talking like a few hundred or a few thousand people—we can get away with just one person, and we do have people that operate independently. For larger events, it may be up to a dozen or more people that are involved.

MLN: What inspired you to found the Bunk Police, and when did you start this project?

AA: We’ve been doing this since 2011, and, at the time, I was finishing up my business degree. Some of my friends were going to these events, and it was pretty clear to me that the substances that they were taking were not what they had intended to take. So, I was looking around on the internet for some sort of solution, and I came across police supply test kits, the ones that they use when they pull somebody over. The company that I found sold directly to the police and it wasn’t available for sale to individuals, but I tried to order anyways, and they sent them.

So, I had all these test kits, and I went to a music festival early in that year and started using them. Pretty quickly, I uncovered a bunch of substances that were not testing correctly. At the time, I had no idea what they were. I was just able to tell people, “Hey. This is not what you wanted.” When we did the first one, we came to find out it was synthetic cathinones being cut into MDMA—you might know them as bath salts. So, I was more or less the first person to uncover the bath salt epidemic as it was happening in the festival circuit by being sold as MDMA.

From there, I continued testing for free at festivals across the US. I lost a whole bunch of money doing this and asking for donations because nobody would donate. At the end of the summer, I was confronted with a couple of options. One option was to drop this completely and finish up my very last semester at business school, where I was in school for marketing with a minor in Mandarin, and do something else. Or I could try to continue this, and with my education, the logical choice was to turn this into a business, so that’s what I did.

I used the last $9,000 of my student loans, and I hired a consultant chemist. We took the patents from the police supply test kits and more or less reverse-engineered them and made a product that wouldn’t violate those patents but would still be useful for these purposes. So from there, I continued. It’s been seven years now, and we just continue to expand. We now have nine different test kits. We can cover pretty much everything that’s on the market now. We also have a more advanced testing method that allows you to separate out mixed substances and identify the components individually, and even, to some extent, quantify them and see how much of each is in the sample. This is called our separation test kit. So, that’s pretty much the story.

What’s In My Baggie? Documentary

[Video: SENTIMENT E]

Ming Lee Newcomb: Can you talk a little bit about trends that you’ve seen over time in test results?

Adam Auctor: Yeah. The research chemical market is constantly changing and expanding. You know, especially a few years ago, there were always new laws coming out that banned certain substances. Whenever one of these substances was banned or whenever one of the precursors to make them was made less accessible, something else would be created by these chemical mills in India, China, or Poland, and a few other places. So it’s just a constant stream of new things that we had to deal with. I could go through the technical side of this and tell you exactly which chemicals they were, but really what you need to know is that they just kept twisting and changing the molecule just enough to get around the laws, and something else would be on the market.

So, we were playing this crazy game of catch up, first of all, just trying to acquire these substances, because that’s what you need in order to figure out how to test for them. Then, we would make sure that they’re an analytical-grade sample by sending it to our laboratory in Spain—a Spanish laboratory that we’ve worked very closely with, which is actually government funded. From there, we would take our different reagent chemicals and film the reactions for each one, and use those filmed reactions or color changes to make the test kits that can be used for these different purposes. All the videos have been made available on YouTube. We have—I don’t even know—1,500 of them or so that are available for anybody to use. We also have an Android app called Bunkleaks, where you’re able to go through and sort all of them.

MLN: Recently, I’ve seen a lot of buzz about fentanyl. Can you talk a little bit about it and what it’s commonly put into? I feel like a lot of people are afraid of it, but they don’t know what it is.

AA: Sure. Well, fentanyl is something to be afraid of. That is for certain. It is an opioid similar to heroin or morphine, but it’s 100 times more potent than heroin. So, it takes a minuscule amount of this to get somebody high or to cause an overdose. Then, there are also analogs of this, such as carfentanyl, which are actually even 100 times stronger than fentanyl. So we’re talking about something that is literally 1,000 times stronger than heroin, and that’s no exaggeration at all.

These substances are being used to adulterate mainstream drugs because it’s incredibly cheap and it’s also very addictive. Whoever is manufacturing these things, be it cartels or some of these larger pill mills out in Eastern Europe, they’re using it because it’s financially beneficial to them. Not only is it highly addictive, but they can also sell a substance that people are going to enjoy for pennies, whereas real cocaine or heroin is going to be exponentially more expensive and less profitable for them.

In terms of the substances that we’re seeing it added into, the big one, of course, is heroin. But, that’s not something that we’re focused on; that’s more in urban areas and not so much in the festival scene. The big deal in the festival scene right now is fentanyl being cut into cocaine, and we’re seeing quite a lot of that. The other concerns are any opioid painkiller—Vicodin, Oxycontin, that sort of thing—and also any benzodiazepine is at risk for this, including Xanax, Valium, and clonazepam, which is also sold as Klonopin. We see very few cases of these, but fentanyl has been found once in ketamine and once on LSD blotter, although I’m not sure that that was actually intended to be sold as LSD, and that was up in Canada. And then once or twice, it’s been found in MDMA, but I’m not sure that the MDMA ones have been confirmed.

But fentanyl is showing up in a bunch of weird things, and it’s led to the deaths of some pretty famous people. Prince was an overdose on fentanyl. From what I understand, he had taken hydrocodone, but fentanyl was found in his system. Tom Petty overdosed on several different variations of fentanyl. Lil Peep overdosed on fentanyl that was cut into Xanax. He made a post I think on Instagram right beforehand with one of these Xanax pills in his mouth right before he died because of it.

MLN: That’s some scary stuff. For fans who are going to a show or a festival, what are your recommendations for staying safe and staying aware?

AA: Well, I would recommend that people sign up for our Bunkbot system if they possibly can—that way, we can alert them if there’s something particularly dangerous at an event. Then, using a test kit is absolutely necessary at this point. And you can purchase those not only from our website, but also through eBay and Etsy, believe it or not, and other companies and harm-reduction organizations that are selling these things as well. They’re available. It’s just imperative that they use one. Beyond that, you have to know the person that you’re buying substances from and have their contact information. Don’t let them just sell it to you and then disappear forever. You need to have some sort of recourse against these people if they do something to you, like sell you a dangerous, adulterated substance.

MLN: Yeah. How frequently do you find that people are surprised by their test results?

AA: We don’t actually do open testing very often. I’ve done it once or twice for different journalists that have been accompanying me over the last year, but I don’t see a ton of results. We definitely do see quite a few people that are really surprised. We’re looking at an adulteration rate of 50% and sometimes more than that in certain areas and demographics. So, the vast majority of the people wouldn’t expect it to be that high and are very surprised. We do get individuals that will see that their substance is not what they had planned on buying, and then take it anyway. I have taken to calling these people Darwinists.

MLN: It seems like Bunk Police is in this weird position. You have to be approachable so that people will want to have these illegal drugs out in the open, testing them and consuming them safely. At the same time, there is an issue with public safety. How frequently do you call on the authorities if you do find that, for example, cocaine is laced with fentanyl? What are your steps after that, and how do you navigate that?

AA: That’s something that we’ve been kind of learning as we go. We’ve never worked closely with the authorities, although whenever we have interacted with them, they’ve been 100% behind us. Nobody in our organization or who have purchased our test kits, as far as I know, has ever been arrested because of them.

When we find or get reports of a fentanyl-laced substance, first of all, we confirm that result. Based on that confirmation, we’d either report it via our Bunkbot system or look further into the incident. This has led to some pretty interesting situations, including confronting fentanyl dealers at several events. I confronted two of them personally at Electric Forest. One ended up crying on camera, trying to convince people that they needed to have better practices in testing their substances because he had no idea what he was selling. For the other person at Electric Forest selling fentanyl-adulterated cocaine, we confronted him, but he went on to sell it anyways. We found him a second time, confronted him again, and did our best to find the person above him and warn them as well. In that situation, we ended up alerting security about the gentleman who had come and sold it to several people in bulk. They never found him. He was apparently already gone for the weekend.

Confession of a Fentanyl Dealer at Electric Forest 2018

[Video: Bunk Police]

At Camp Bisco, we were looking for the dealer that was selling adulterated cocaine, and before we were able to find her, she was confronted by an angry mob of people that wanted their money back and were very upset with her. Security ended up stepping in for that situation, and she was taken elsewhere and presumably removed from the event—and hopefully arrested for what she was doing. We’re not of the opinion that everybody that needs to be turned in to the police for selling substances, but people that are selling adulterated substances, they deserve what they get in these circumstances. Not knowing is not an excuse when we’re talking about something like fentanyl.

Ming Lee Newcomb: What would you say are some of the biggest challenges of your job?

Adam Auctor: Just this crazy grey-area legality that I’m trying to deal with is probably one of the larger challenges. Our test kits are legal on a federal level, so it’s sort of the opposite of where marijuana is right now. In 14 states, test kits are legal. In 36 states, they’re either in a grey area where the laws could be applied or they’re outright illegal. Now, I’ve seen a change in this recently. Rhode Island, for instance, just snapped their fingers and made test kits legal, because they’re distributing them. We sell our fentanyl test kits to the government, and especially state governments, which distributes them. So, it’s only a matter of time before these government entities realize that they’re distributing an illegal product and that they need to change the law. We’re seeing all this change right in front of us right now after battling it for seven years.

Another one of the huge issues I have involves event promoters and their reluctance to allow harm-reduction services in general at events. They worry about their insurance premiums going up due to admitting, more or less, that these substances are present, even though there’s nothing that they can do to stop it. There are problems they believe can stem from a piece of legislation called the ‘RAVE Act’, which is ‘Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2001.’ It’s vaguely written to the point where promoters are worried that it could be applied to them for allowing harm reduction, though it’s never been applied that way. When it comes down to it, there’s a lot of research that indicates that this would never happen, because there has to be intent behind allowing the sale of substances at these events. So, they’re just scared of this stupid piece of legislation from 17 years ago that is vague enough that they think it could be applied to them, so their lawyers advise them not to take a stand.

But, we’re seeing different organizations, such as the production company behind Lost Lands, who have decided to step out and say, “Enough is enough. We’re going to allow this at our events.” And they’ve spoken with local police departments and gotten their permission, more or less, to allow it.

MLN: For people who are interested in helping or getting involved in the Bunk Police, what suggestions do you have for people to help you in your mission?

AA: Well, we’re in the process of creating a 501(c)(3) nonprofit specifically for Bunkbot. We’re going to need quite a few volunteers with technical expertise to help us create a more intricate system to deal with this and also run it. Over the course of the next year, we’re going to be taking a little bit of time off to change the system and improve it. So, people with technical knowledge—be it building apps or websites or anything like that—you could contact me at Bunkpolice@gmail.com.

We’re also looking for distributors to work with Bunkbot at events. We can’t be everywhere, and there has to be somebody physically present at the event with test kits to give to people who are interested in them. So, we’re looking for people to help us distribute test kits at these events through Bunkbot, and I’d be happy to speak with anybody who has experience in these sorts of environments who’s willing to help. I would hear anybody out who’s willing to help.

MLN: Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to include in this article or anything else that you’d like to add?

AA: Yes. The key to changing the minds of voters and making fans who go to these events aware of what’s happening is for artists to stand up and say something—if they can, do something. Talk to their fans about what’s happening. Talk about fentanyl. Talk about the issues that harm-reduction organizations are having. And also, make this part of your conversation with promoters that are creating the events that they’re attending. We don’t have the kind of reach necessary to make this change. We’ve been throwing rocks at the brick wall that promoters have put up for the better part of a decade now. The artists are the ones that have the wrecking ball able to take that wall down by reaching out to their fans and asking for a change.

For more information on The Bunk Police or to purchase test kits, head to their website here. Learn how to join The Bunk Police’s new fan alert system, Bunkbot, here, and start out by texting “bunk” to 555-888. Most importantly, we love you guys, and stay safe out there.