Colombian Activists Destigmatize Drug Use—and Make It Safer

Before heading on vacation, Esteban Pinzon, a 36-year-old public school teacher, makes a hotel reservation, packs a suitcase, and visits a drug-checking site in Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, to test a swatch of the psychedelic LSD he has saved for the occasion.

In a quiet residential neighborhood near downtown Bogotá, Pinzon enters a graffiti-scrawled building, where he’s led into a room outfitted with a small lab. A mural on the hallway reads: “End the War on Drugs.” A lab technician takes Pinzon’s paper square of LSD and douses a small sample with a reactant. It turns a dark copper color, a sign the drug is not what it appears to be.

“There’s no presence of LSD,” Christian Gordillo, the lab technician at Échele Cabeza, the drug-checking site, tells him. “So we don’t recommend taking it.”

With drugs banned around the world, substances are manufactured and sold without regulation, putting the health of consumers at risk. Drug checking is a way to protect consumers by testing the makeup of drugs and providing recommendations that help them to make safer choices. 

Drug checking originates in the ’90s European club scene, where the service was commonly used to test synthetic drugs like MDMA during electronic music concerts. But in Colombia, a country at the epicenter of the war on drugs, drug checking has transformed drug users and those most affected by prohibitionist policies into activists, championing harm-reduction strategies and drug legalization. 

“Drug checking started as a strategy to care for people’s health and has ended up becoming a social movement that is demanding rights, but also proposing actions to change drug policy,” says Julián Quintero, founder of Échele Cabeza.

From Prohibition to Harm Reduction

For decades, Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, has persecuted drug traffickers and targeted the farming of coca plants, the natural ingredient used in cocaine. Colombia has also used its police force to crack down on drug users, who are often labeled by society as criminals or vagrants.

But Quintero, who began using cocaine, alcohol, and other drugs as a sociology student in the mid-aughts, questioned conventional drug policy. By the time he was in college, the Medellín and Cali Cartel, Colombia’s infamous drug cartels, had been dismantled, but the drug business still flourished. Other armed groups filled the void left by the cartels and took control of the trade. Despite numerous efforts to eliminate the trade, Quintero knew drugs were here to stay.

“The war on drugs had failed, so it was time to start proposing other strategies,” says Quintero.

In 2010, Quintero launched Échele Cabeza, a nonprofit that strives to make drug use safer instead of trying to eliminate it outright. At first, he focused on spreading information on drug use, with the aim of preventing overdoses. Two years later, Quintero opened a drug-checking booth in Bogotá’s underground raves, using reactants sent by Energy Control, a Spain-based harm-reduction program.

While Colombia has never faced an opioid crisis to the same degree the U.S. has, the growing popularity of synthetic drugs and their alterations posed a risk to Colombians. Échele Cabeza aims to catch the dangerous alterations before they are consumed. But nearly immediately, Quintero said Colombia’s media and politicians accused the organization of promoting drug use.

The nonprofit eventually won over some of its detractors by publishing reports about the adulterated drugs they detected. Their reports attracted the attention of Colombia’s Justice Ministry, which reached out to Échele Cabeza to request leftover drug samples in an effort to help identify new substances on the market. 

In 2013, the government granted the nonprofit a permit to operate legally in return for regular samples. Échele Cabeza became the first drug-checking organization in Latin America to have a government permit. “We’re located in the Global South, so no one found out, but we were the first to operate with a permit, before anyone in England or in the United States,” Quintero says.

That permit allowed them to foray into renown music festivals and exclusive clubs, where their services suddenly reached a wider audience. Concert goers were not only finding their services valuable, but also demanded that they be available at festivals. As demand grew beyond the festival circuit, Échele Cabeza opened its first permanent drug-checking office in 2023, where it currently offers services three times per week. That same year, Échele Cabeza also opened the first supervised drug-consumption site in South America.

Drug Checking Goes Mainstream

At the drug-checking site, youth carrying drugs stored in plastic bags file into the lab, where drug checking costs 20,000 pesos, or about $5 per substance. In another room, a psychologist is available for clients who wish to discuss problematic relationships with drugs or to ask for advice on how to speak to children about drug use. 

On a recent afternoon, Esteban Pinzón, the 36-year-old public school teacher, wondered aloud what to do with the drug that had been misrepresented as LSD. Gordillo, the lab technician, said there was no way to find out exactly what the drug is. In this case, the reactants only determined whether the sample included LSD or not. But he said that it was likely 251-NBOMe, a psychedelic Pinzón had taken before. 

Pinzón hesitated before saying whether he would use the drug or not. “The analysis created a lot of distrust,” Pinzón explains. “I’d rather take it easy.”

Between 2013 and April 2024, Échele Cabeza analyzed 39,982 substances. Of those substances, about 13% were adulterated. A 2023 study published by graduate students at Bogotá’s Andes University examined whether Échele Cabeza’s services changed the behavior of its users. The study found that there was a significant increase in self-care practices adopted by service users when compared to those who didn’t use the service and that negative effects associated with drug use increased among those who hadn’t used the services. 

Quintero said the impact of their services and their regular reports on Instagram, which currently has more than 220,000 followers, has earned them credibility. They are now commonly cited in news reports and consulted by magistrates from the Constitutional Court, Colombia’s top judicial body. Their influence has also reached the highest levels of government. 

When President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022, he called the war on drugs a “failure” and vowed to end it. While his actual drug policies have not been as far reaching, his administration consulted Quintero as well as a number of other experts in the development of a new national drug plan, which included harm reduction strategies, such as improving access to naloxone, a drug used to reverse an opioid overdose, and strengthening drug-checking organizations. 

According to the Justice Ministry, there are currently 13 groups operating across the country. Quintero said the Petro administration is tapping Échele Cabeza to provide training to these groups and to create a national network. “The government wants to bring together all these youth-led projects from all over the country and train them to do the same thing we did, which we think is amazing,” Quintero says.

The rise of new drug-checking initiatives are an indication that attitudes toward drug policy are changing, Quintero said. He hopes this momentum will give way to drug legalization that includes cocaine, which he said would make drug use safer. 

While he acknowledges drug legalization is still far off, he trusts the next generation might actually achieve this far-reaching goal. “I’m not in a rush now because I know it’s going to happen,” says Quintero. “All we have to do is to continue to work and to allow the next generation to take over.”