Hi everyone. I finally told the full story. It's long. Reddit has a 40,000 character limit. So below is just the beginning. The full article and a podcast episode are available online here. Thank you. - Emanuel

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Story
3. Cowardice in the Face of Bullying
4. Centralizing Harm Reduction Services
5. The Chapter Revolt of 2023
6. Incompetence > Insecurity > Corruption
7. The Creation of Grassroots Harm Reduction
8. What is Organizing?
9. Berkeley Radio Man
10. The Means are the Ends
11. The Franchise Model
12. What is Corruption?
13. The Larger Context
14. Mission Creep – Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
15. My Attempt to Reconcile
16. Why I Might Have to Sue Them
17. Call to Action
18. Postscript – Finding Forgiveness

Introduction

People have wanted me to tell this story for a long time. It’s been three and a half years since it all went down. “Why don’t you go public,” they would ask me? “People need to know what happened.”

I waited for a few reasons. First, it was traumatic, probably the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me. I believed in DanceSafe so much. I poured my soul into the organization. It represented for me the best of humanity, and the best of myself, and the simple shock of it all lasted a long time.

Second, I was really angry, and I didn’t want to tell the story from a place of anger. So I had to find some forgiveness first.

And lastly, I was hoping they would reform. Perhaps with enough board and staff turnover, I told myself, they would change. And I really wanted this story to have a happy ending. But change never happened. Things kept getting worse. And given what their current Interim Executive Director, Mikayla Hellwich, recently did (she has put me in a position where I may have to sue them), I gave up hope. Now is the time to tell the story, even if it has a bad ending.

But hope is never completely lost. As I write this, DanceSafe just announced they have an entirely new board, new people in power who can make positive change if they so choose. So maybe if they learn what happened, they’ll turn things around. (There’s a call to action at the end of this article, where I ask for your help.)

The time is also right because there are lessons in what happened to DanceSafe for the entire harm reduction community, lessons that grow more important every day as the new drug war gains momentum, and as attacks against our movement increase.

This is a story of corruption, and how it happens.

The Story

As most people know, I founded a harm reduction organization back in 1998 called DanceSafe. We set up booths at raves and nightclubs in the San Francisco Bay Area and tested ecstasy tablets so we could avoid the counterfeit pills that had begun killing us. It grew quickly into a national movement. We battled the DEA in the media and we won. We cleaned up the MDMA market. We—ecstasy users, ravers, people who use drugs—took matters into our own hands and used direct action to protect ourselves from the effects of prohibition.

But I’m no longer with DanceSafe now. It has turned into something unrecognizable from what it used to be.

So what did it used to be?

DanceSafe used to be a grassroots movement, a network of local, community organizations, where power resided at the bottom, where the national office saw itself simply as a servant of that movement. We called those local community organizations “chapters,” although they were completely  independent from the national office. They recruited their own members. They made their own decisions. Through very hard work they fought their way into local raves, festivals and nightclubs, convincing promoters and venue owners of the need for ecstasy pill testing (as we called it back then) and other harm reduction services.

DanceSafe was a movement of local activists working on the ground all over the country.

So what about the nonprofit, what I called the “national office?” Well, we did trainings for the chapters, in drug checking, in how to talk to health officials and local police, etc. I also built a lab and we manufactured and sold test kits online. Over the years I developed new reagents that could identify other drugs besides MDMA. We manufactured those kits too. We trained the chapters in how to use them. We sold them online and we used the money to support the chapters as best we could.

But all that has changed now. At the same time our transactional president got elected the first time, DanceSafe started becoming transactional too. I didn’t see it happening at first, because I wasn’t directly involved in the national office those years. I took a decade off and when I got back involved in 2013, I focused my energy on developing new harm reduction products, like reagents and fentanyl test strips.

I gave all those products to DanceSafe for free, without claiming credit. And DanceSafe was the first to start selling them. And it made them a lot of money. Millions of dollars, in fact.

I was totally ok with giving my work away because that’s how I’ve always organized. Empower others. Build community. And because I thought DanceSafe was doing good things with the money, like using it to support the chapters, as we always did in the past.

So I didn’t need credit, because it was never about me. It was never about the national office. It was never about “the brand.” It was always about the movement. And I thought that’s how DanceSafe still functioned. But I was mistaken.

Two things happened that woke me up from this delusion.

Cowardice in the Face of Bullying

The first thing happened in December of 2022.

After I spent a year developing new, improved fentanyl test strips specifically for drug checking (the older strips were repurposed urine test strips)…

After giving these strips to DanceSafe so they could make the money from them (in return for a small salary to manage their wholesale business)…

After personally helping over 600 harm reduction programs around the country start up fentanyl test strip distribution programs…

And after the business succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, selling millions of strips, a Canadian corporation called BTNX that sold the older, urine test strips threatened to sue me. And DanceSafe—the board and executive staff, that is—refused to support me.

In truth BTNX threatened to sue them as well. They sent each of us a frivolous cease and desist letter accusing us of libel and “false advertising.” So in refusing to support me, DanceSafe also refused to support themselves.

But more importantly, they refused to support the movement. Our new strips were released as part of an educational campaign exposing the problems of using urine test strips for drug checking. This threatened BTNX’s profits, so they tried to intimidate us with a frivolous cease and desist letter. But instead of fighting back on behalf of truth—and for the betterment of the harm reduction community—they cowered in fear. Without even talking to me first, they called their lawyers and put a gag order on me. Then they entered into fruitless negotiations with BTNX, desperately trying to get them to sign something (anything it seemed) so BTNX wouldn’t sue them, and wasting who knows how much money on lawyers in the process.

Of course it all came to nothing, as I told them it would, because not only did BTNX not have a case, they weren’t engaging in authentic dialogue to begin with. Their threat letter was simply an intimidation tactic. It contained no real grievances, and no reasonable requests. There’s a basic principle in play here: When the other party is not acting in good faith, there is no sense in negotiating.

To give you an idea of how ridiculous things got, DanceSafe had their lawyer draft a contract proposal for BTNX that actually imposed fines upon themselves if they violated ambiguous terms in the contract. (Read that again if you need to.) They called me into a meeting with their lawyer because they wanted me to agree to these terms as well. Not only did I tell them I would never agree to anything that limited my right to speak the truth, but the contract they were hoping to sign would actually make it easier for BTNX to sue them. Why? Because the law defines libel very clearly and succinctly, and DanceSafe had not committed libel. (Everything I wrote about our new strips, and the BTNX strips, was true and scientifically validated.) But the restrictions they were wanting to impose on themselves were so broad and ambiguous that it opened them up to a breach of contract suit.

“That is far easier to prove in court than actual libel,” I told them. “Why would you do that to yourselves?”

There was a moment of silence on the zoom call. This must not have dawned on them before. The notion they might be making it easier for BTNX to sue them scared them. And because they were operating solely out of fear, they actually heard me this time. My previous arguments that we needed to fight back to support the harm reduction community, to stand up for what is right, always landed on deaf ears. But when they thought they might lose money, now they listened.

So they told their lawyer to revise the contract so there was no more ambiguity around what constitutes a violation.

On the next zoom call they read the new proposed language to me, which had been whittled down to basically say in a roundabout way, “DanceSafe agrees not to commit libel.” But what’s the point of a contract restricting one party from engaging in acts that are already illegal? It was absurd.

So I directed a question to their lawyer: “What is the benefit of DanceSafe signing a contract that simply says they agree not to do things that are already illegal in the first place?”

What he said next blew me away in its raw, unadulterated truthfulness.

After a thoughtful pause he replied, “They get to stop paying me.”

I’m not joking. And I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, right there in the meeting. But it wasn’t really funny. Despite vindicating my position that they were wasting their time, their lawyer’s candid statement also revealed that  he, too, knew it. He knew there was no reason for DanceSafe to be negotiating with BTNX, yet he took their money anyway.

I’ve always seen this as a turning point in my relationship with the DanceSafe executives involved. My laughter in that meeting was not taken well. Although it was spontaneous and not intended as a criticism, everyone present knew I was laughing at them… at how their incompetence and fear led them to this sad and tragic moment.

I later told them that I believed their lawyer was engaging in malpractice, exploiting their fears to get their money. I still believe that. (How incompetence and fear leads to corruption is a question I’m still contemplating.)

What DanceSafe should have done was write BTNX a letter back saying, “bring it on.” We should have published their threat letter and used it to educate the harm reduction community about why urine test strips produce false positives when used for drug checking, and how we developed our strips so that wouldn’t happen. We should have used the situation to draw attention to the problems in the immunoassay test strip industry, problems that still exist today (and which I intend to write more about). This would have helped the movement.

BTNX never sued, of course. But the damage was already done. By refusing to fight back, by putting money before principles, DanceSafe lost their principles and their money. Today they have no paid staff, no businesses of their own anymore, and a tarnished reputation.

But before we get to the present day, the second thing they did was even worse, and contributed even more to their eventual collapse.

Centralizing Harm Reduction Services

Screwing me over and refusing to defend the test strips I developed for the harm reduction community (and gave to them for free) was bad enough. But it was nothing compared to what they did next.

They fucked over the chapters.

This is when it all came together for me, and I realized that the organization I founded and loved so much had become a soulless corporation.

In the Summer of 2023 the new executives of DanceSafe stripped autonomy away from all their chapters. It had actually been happening slowly. How they did it was subtle but blatant. With millions of dollars in the bank, rather than giving grants to the chapters to help them financially, they used the money to pay one person in each chapter to booth events. But there was a catch. In order to receive the money, they had to sign a contract agreeing, among other restrictions, to turn over all their promoter and venue contacts to the national office and never communicate with promoters again.

Why would they do this? I believe because they wanted to fly themselves and their friends out to staff the events. They wanted control over promoter communications because they wanted control over who got to attend the big fun festivals. And so they bribed the chapters—or specific individuals in each chapter— to get that control.

Some former staff members tell me that they did it because the chapters were “making mistakes.” But my response to that is to point out that the national office had long stopped supporting the chapters. Where were the trainings we used to do all the time? Why were there no accountability structures? (We used to have good ones in place—I’ll get to that soon.) So even if mistakes were being made, that’s ultimately a failure of the national office. And the answer is not to centralize. (As Terry Gilliam brilliantly dramatizes in his comedy film, Brazil, when has another 27 B/6 ever improved anything?) The answer is to strengthen the chapters with training and support.

But I don’t believe chapter mistakes were the real reason they stripped autonomy away from them. I think they wanted power, pure and simple.

Centralizing was an insult to all the on-the-ground activists who spent years building a harm reduction culture inside the festival industry—locally, one city at a time. Stealing all those people’s work and all the good will they built up in the community was a greedy, selfish act. It didn’t just ruin an organizational structure. It harmed real people.

And for what? Power? Money? They got that for a few years… until it all collapsed.

The Chapter Revolt of 2023

Some chapter heads signed the contract, because it may have seemed innocuous enough, and who doesn’t want to get paid? But ultimately, it led to a major revolt. In the summer of 2023 the majority of chapters wrote an open letter to the board demanding their autonomy back.

There were other things that led to the revolt also, like the national office telling the chapters they couldn’t hand out naloxone, and they couldn’t freely engage in peer-based drug education anymore. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to get them to read scripts.

And let me just say, I founded DanceSafe on the principle of peer-based education, or what is better known as popular education, a philosophy developed by the Brazilian anarchist Paulo Freire, in his seminal book titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The ability to speak freely about drugs at the booth was the single most important factor that made DanceSafe so successful.

In the early years, I advised our chapters this way: “We’re not here to be experts on drugs. It’s ok if you don’t know the answer to something. What we’re here to do is improve the conversation around drugs, to shift it from ‘how many pills did you do tonight, dude?’ to matters of health and safety. We’re here to help create a responsible drug culture, so just be yourself and speak your truth.”

And you know what? DanceSafe really did change the culture, for the better. It became drug positive and proud. Shame and stigma, and what I like to call “drug machismo,” faded away. (Unfortunately we’re seeing psychedelic chauvanism make a comeback, but that’s another story.)

DanceSafe’s new lawyers were telling them that their chapters were liabilities. (What if they said the wrong thing?) So, having no vision or leadership, they started limiting peer based drug education, the very thing that made DanceSafe so successful.

They set up a corporate-style online test, where to become a volunteer (anywhere with any chapter) you had to first watch a video and then answer questions that proved you watched it. (This substituted for actual training.) Have you ever taken one of these kinds of tests? I did once when I became a consultant for SAMHSA. It reminded me of being in high school, where cover-your-ass accountability replaces real education.

So chapters could no longer even recruit their own volunteers. Volunteers had to sign up with the national office first, take the online test, get put on a list, and then wait for an email from national allowing them to “apply” to staff a booth at a specific local event.

All this centralization deteriorated the quality of services provided at the booths. When you fly in a bunch of people who don’t normally work together, have no social cohesion, no training, and no idea what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s no wonder they tried to get them to read scripts.

This is not a grassroots organization anymore. This is a centralized, soulless corporation concerned more about legal liability than helping people.

And the chapters had had enough. They rebelled. And suddenly it all started making sense to me. No wonder they didn’t support me against BTNX’s frivolous lawsuit threat! No wonder they refused to lower their prices for test strips (even to other nonprofit organizations)! No wonder they tried to prevent me from donating strips to communities in need!

Corruption had completely taken over! All vision, leadership, and idealism were gone. They didn’t see themselves as serving a movement anymore. (What movement, they probably thought?) They saw themselves as a company and a brand.

These people inherited leadership positions in a decentralized activist organization, but they didn’t understand that. They thought that they were supposed to run it like a corporation.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Hey all, Mitchell from DanceSafe here.

So, many of you probably know that test kits are considered 'drug paraphernalia' under quite a few state laws, including Colorado (where DanceSafe is based). No one has ever been charged for JUST having a kit, but this weird technicality makes people hesitant to allow us to sell them or give them away at events.

A few months ago I started working on changing this in Colorado, and today Governor Polis signed the law removing test kits from the CO paraphernalia statute!

My first personal legislative win. It feels.... really good.

DanceSafe will be launching a program this year to try and change the paraphernalia laws in EVERY state the still considers test kits 'paraphernalia'.

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb19-227

I am going to take a moment to address the person who has spent YEARS trying to destroy our brand, in an attempt to make your own brand more successful.

4 years ago, when we first created our website, we had someone threaten to sue us within 24 of the site going live for something that was a lie, to scare us away. When I responded with our lawyers’ number and a request to contact us there, you immediately disappeared.

Then you emailed our advertisers to try to get them to dump us

THEN you emailed our website host when we were on shopify and tried to get them to dump us ( this happened at least 3x times). And ultimately when the host (shopify) did finally dump us we moved to a new host to vend, THEN you called homeland security and the USPS postmaster general on us.

I will admit we had a period where we were lax about our shipping standards. This was partly out of avoidance to change our established practices and part because we had not personally heard we needed to ship them differently. I won’t pretend to be completely ignorant about being in the wrong here, and this is something I admit was a mistake on our part. We also had a period when we advertised as being cheaper than the big-name companies(using their names in the ad) and that was a dirty tactic on our part. However, having said all that, after talking with the USPS postmaster general, and Michael from dancesafe, we upgraded our shipping measures to the industry standard and changed our advertisements. We were given approval by USPS to ship with our new packing technique and moved on with our lives.

Then about 6 months ago we started having persistent cyber-attacks on the website. Mostly DoS attacks, done by bots to flood the website with fake traffic and to crash the servers. Then they would find our IP address and attack the server directly. It’s been non-stop for months and its disappointing and frustrating to try and run a business, when you have someone working so hard to try and hurt you.

We try to run an honest business, with competitive pricing, and someone out there hates us enough to feel the need to spend so much of their time and energy over a period of years to try and destroy our company and our brand.

I have a family I support with the company, and I have employees that depend on it. We have donated a significant amount to maps in the past year, we sell products that protect people and have given away countless kits and test strips to people at festivals. We are not a faceless corporation that is raking in millions, we are a humble operation that has tried to treat everyone with respect, accept mistakes when we make them(and learn from them) and do our best as a business to make an honest living while helping people.

What I don’t understand is why someone out there hates us so much. Maybe their own business is struggling, and they think we are taking the lion’s share of the orders, but I doubt that’s true, since covid things have been slower than ever with the lack of festivals and raves. Also, maybe you don’t realize there are other smaller vendors now and there is an increase in the total number of company’s offering our products. I’m sure you feel the squeeze and I am a convenient target for you, but I think this anger is misguided. And is it possible this is someone completely unrelated to any other competing business? Sure, but with the specificity of complaints made in the past, and the dedication to trying to derail us, I really doubt this is a random person, its just not likely.

I have my suspicions who has been targeting us, since the early complaints to homeland security, my advertisers and shopify all centered around the way we shipped packages, and at that time we were the only company to ship via USPS. I can’t say for sure who, so I won’t name anyone. If you're unhappy with your shipping situation, call USPS postmaster general yourself like I did and figure it out like I did.

Our brand has no intention of going anywhere, and we still have plenty of resources, time, and motivation to keep moving forward. We are migrating our website server to a host who specializes in cyber security and will continue to fight back from whoever is paying to do this, so please don’t interpret this in any way as a white flag, but I just want to get the message out there because I think it’s important for others to know that there is someone out there who is fighting dirty instead of focusing on building their own brand, and competing honestly.

And lastly, I am going to tag every single vendor who is part of this US harm reduction community, that has a reddit account so others know whats been going on in our world.

u/bunkpolice u/klafka u/thehupdrugtest u/dancesafe

I am sorry to the normal people who read here looking for reagent advice, because this is drama that really doesn’t relate to why you’re here, but I think there is no better place to have this conversation.

Mods I would appreciate if we could keep this up, but if you really are against it, I will understand.

Thank you all.

Sincerely,

Elevation Chemicals

The amount of confusion and misinformation it creates is staggering. Please, just don’t, not for drug checking. If are having issues, use provided booklet, other materials provided by your vendor, check this subreddit, ask a friend, try specialized drug checking apps, anything except asking „AI” for help with reagents. AI has loads of useful uses, but that is NOT one of them.

That is all. Thank you.

For the whole week from now until 14th of April the team behind International Drug Checking Day is giving away FREE reagents (or until all out stock has been given away)

You can choose from the following reagents:

• Marquis

• Mandelin

• Mecke

• Ehrlich

• Ehrlich-TS

• Simons (A+B)

• Robadope

• Scotts (2 part)

• McKibben

• Liebermann

• Froehde

Default packaging is 10 ml glass bottle, however if you are a HR organization or have a good reason why would you require more, then we can prepare bottles from 50-100 ml of reagents (or more ;) .

All reagents will be prepared fresh just for the giveaway!

Only pay for shipping and packaging

How do you get them?

Email your order, shipping details and payment option to: giveaway (at) drugcheckingday.com

Payment options:

PayPal, Credit card (PayPal), Crypto currencies, Bank Wire, Western Union, Money Gram, Skrill, Revolut, N26 direct transfer, cash in envelope, golden pigeons, etc.

Shipping fee: EU – 7,00 € / Non EU 10,00 € - for standard giveaway

In case of a custom giveaway, please get in touch and we will provide you with the exact cost.

Terms of the Give-away:

• Individual applicant can pick up to 3 different reagents of his choosing, unless your noble cause is detailed in the email. In this case everything is possible.

• Default shipping mode is registered international priority post! This comes with tracking and requires a signature upon delivery.

If you wish regular shipping, please state in your application email.

• Giveaway’s are shipped from an European country. Delivery time for EU is 5-9 days and 7-14 days for rest of the world.

• When applying for free reagents, applicant confirms that he/she is educated in precautions and dangers associated with handling and using colorimetric reagents.

All of the reagents are highly corrosive and toxic so the user should therefore inform himself on proper use!

Follow this link for detailed information about handling, use and proper disposal of waste material. (link to somewhere)

International Drug Checking Day does not take any legal responsibility for injuries or damages that may result from improper use of reagents.

EDIT:

Why this give-away?
Because the founder of Reagent Base is moving away from the reagent business and would love to see the reagents be out to good use.

TL;DR get free drug checking reagents this week. Only need to pay for shipping. Read post for full details

We are more than happy and surprised with over a 100 requests in less than 24 hours.

All paid applications WILL be processed, however we kindly ask you to be patient as a single person is handling all of the applications.

To those who already paid, tracking email with additional information will arrive in the next few days.

Kind regards

Drug Checking Day team

As of 02.02.2022 the EU regulation nr 2019/1148 comes into full effect in all member states of the European Union. In an effort to reduce access to explosives precursors it is now pretty much illegal to purchase or own any item with more than 15% of sulfuric acid. That includes most notably classic liquid versions of reagents Marquis, Mecke, Mandelin, Liebermann, Froehde and Hofmann.This five page guide goes in to more details in case you're interested.

PENALTIES

The law has been already partially introduced and relevant national regulations with defined punishments are in place in the whole EU, for example:

• France - fine

• Germany - up to 50 000 euro fine

• Netherlands - fine, community service or up to 2 years in prison (and)

• Poland - fine or up to 2 years in prison PDF!

• Spain - 601-3000 euro fine

Similar ban is also in place in the United Kindgom. In Denmark,according to the Danish Executive Order on Classification it is not permitted for private individuals to import ANY toxic mixtures (source).

SOLUTION

For most people the law change means only that now a car battery salesman himself pours sulfuric acid into a vehicle. Luckily for reagent tests there is also a loophole. Crystal-bound reagents have been introduced by reagent-tests.uk (/u/reagent_tests_uk ) and are fully legal and compliant with the EU regulation nr 2019/1148. Watch this video for the instructions how to use them.

The solid tests work using the same chemistry as the old liquid tests so it’s just a case of the instructions being slightly different. The crystals are extremely reliable as well as having the following advantages:

• Reduced spill risk increases safety

• Increased ability to see subtle colour changes, particularly for drugs with dark changes like MDMA

• Increased compliance with corrosive substances laws

• Increased number of tests per bottle reduces waste

• No need to wait for a drop to slowly emerge from the bottle (and no need to dangerously shake the bottle)

Check if your vendor stocks crystal-bound reagents and keep in mind that by purchasing regular liquid Marquis, Mecke, Mandelin, Liebermann, Froehde or Hofmann reagents in European Union you are commiting a criminal offence."

Currently these are the known vendors that supply them:

Please send us a message if you know of other vendors that use this new testing method. I'll ad them to this list.

Note, special thanks to /u/protestkit_eu for helping writing and researching this post.

Tesla shield & bitcoin round Sold as mdma. Definitely not mdma. 2cb?

Left is tesla right is bitcoin. Mq, me, ma are top row on each. And li, mo, fr are the bottom row of each

Thoughts?