EUDA webinar: International drug checking day
Objective: Taking place on the eve of International Drug Checking Day, this webinar offers a timely opportunity to highlight the role drug-checking services play across three domains: harm reduction, drug market monitoring and public health alerts. The session will demonstrate the benefits of drug checking for a variety of stakeholders, including consumers, public health authorities and monitoring systems.
Background: Rapid shifts in Europe's drug market are creating new health and security risks, challenging countries’ capacity to respond effectively. Risks to public health are posed by the availability and use of an increasingly diverse range of substances, often of high potency and purity. People who use drugs are now exposed to a wider range of psychoactive substances than in the past, which appear in new forms, mixtures and combinations. Products are sometimes mis-sold and consumers may be unaware of what they are taking. As a result, they may be subject to greater health risks, including potentially fatal poisoning.
Drug checking services respond to these challenges: they are harm reduction services that provide individuals who use drugs with information on the chemical content of their samples as well as advice, and, in some cases, counselling or brief interventions.
As a harm reduction intervention, drug checking aims to prevent unintended overdoses and poisonings by unexpected substances, dangerous combinations of substances, or by drugs of unexpectedly high purity or potency. Drug checking can reach populations that are not in contact with any other drug service, and issue and deliver alerts when dangerous drugs are detected.
As a drug market monitoring tool, drug checking provides extremely timely insights into the composition of drugs circulating on local markets or obtained online. It provides information about the sellers’ intent and the difference between what people think they are consuming and what they are really using. As such, drug checking is an important tool for monitoring the evolution of the new psychoactive substance (NPS) market as well as markets which are hard to reach. The EUDA works to integrate drug checking data into its integrated monitoring system.
In conversation with:
- Mireia Ventura, Energy Control (Spain);
- Laura Smit-Rigter, Trimbos Instituut (Netherlands);
- Helena Valente, Kosmicare (Portugal).
Chairperson: Kateřina Škařupová, EUDA.
Opening remarks: Dr Lorraine Nolan (EUDA Executive Director)
Support team: Marica Ferri, Anna Ferrara, Marco Costa, Silke Vitt (EUDA).
Format: Opening remarks, speaker presentations, panellists’ questions, audience Q&A and closing remarks.
Length: 1.5 hours.
Participants: Open to all registered attendees (a joining link will be provided upon registration).
Webinar etiquette: We welcome participants using the chat during the webinar but kindly ask them to refrain from using it for airing grievances, promoting events/commercial initiatives or misusing contact details. Please engage with courtesy and respect. Violation of these guidelines may result in exclusion from the chat by the administrator. Thank you for your cooperation in making this webinar a positive and focused learning experience for all.
Date: 30 March 2026, 12:00–13:30 Lisbon time (WEST) — 13:00–14:30 (CEST).
Platform: Zoom.