Fentanyl test strips are in demand at Bay Area bars and restaurants: ‘People come in just for the strips’
Heller is the co-founder of the nonprofit FentCheck, which orders fentanyl test strips from a Canada-based manufacturer, BTNX, and brings them into bars, restaurants and other venues in the Bay Area after adding easy-to-read, printed instructions to each strip and packaging them in a plastic fishbowl.
The test strips are one way that an increasing number of Bay Area business owners — primarily those of bars and restaurants, but even in places like art galleries and tattoo parlors — are responding to the fentanyl crisis. And many, having had the test strips since last summer or earlier, say that demand is brisk.
To use the strips, people take a tiny fraction of a drug, mix it with water and then dip the strip into the mixture and wait to see if it turns up positive for fentanyl. That way, people intending to use drugs that are not fentanyl, like cocaine or ecstasy, can test to see if it’s been cut with the dangerous opioid.
Scott Ayers, who owns Rockridge Improvement Club, said demand for the strips is higher than he’d thought it would be. His bar receives around 100 test strips a week, with restocks almost every other day.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “Some people come in just for the strips.”FentCheck’s co-founders say the strips are one form of “harm reduction,” reducing the chance that a recreational user would overdose after unknowingly consuming fentanyl-laced drugs.
“People are going to experiment anyway,” Heller said, adding that testing their drugs gives them the opportunity to be safe. “Harm reduction is for everybody, and we’re targeting a demographic that doesn’t realize it’s for them.”
The demand for the strips comes amid an increasingly deadly drug overdose epidemic. In San Francisco, about 7 in 10 overdose deaths in the past two years have involved fentanyl.
But fentanyl was very rarely the sole drug found in the system of people who fatally overdosed, medical examiner data shows. And because fentanyl can be lethal in very tiny amounts, even the slightest cross-contamination — intentional or not — could have serious consequences.
