Harm Reduction
Before my son moved to Canada five years ago he had been to many music festivals in the UK. He’d worked on the construction of the Shangri-La stage at Glastonbury, an area described as “Always full of hidden treats, shocks and surprises. Try all the doors.”
He had helped create and run the Curious Yellow Festival — a small boutique event in the UK, so it was no surprise that when he landed in a tiny Canadian Rockies town he sought out the local music events.
What he found, 150 miles away, was Shambhala.
Shambhala Music Festival has been held at Salmo River Ranch for 22 years and attracts world renowned DJs and artists to the wilds of interior British Columbia. Its widely held to be one of the most beautiful festival venues in the world.
True to form, Adam didn’t just buy a ticket. He found someone in his town who worked at the festival every year and got hired as a crew member, helping to set up and take down the six stages and many other jobs that need doing to turn a 500 acre off grid working ranch into a festival site accomodating 17,000 people for five days.
What he discovered was a close knit community who have been going to the festival for 20 years and think of themselves as family. And something even more surprising.
The “someone” who introduced him to the festival and helped him to get hired as a crew member works for ANKORS.
Here’s what ANKORS does:
Drugs exist at festivals. Drug users and drug sellers.
Instead of refusing to acknowledge it, forcing people to hide it, ANKORS and the festival organisers set up an anonymous drug testing unit so that people could have their drugs analysed so they know what was really in the stuff they’d bought and could then decide for themselves if they wanted to take it or not.
ANKORS uses a FTIR spectrometer and fentanyl test strips. The spectrometer is among the best pieces of technology available to get the job done. It can analyze a substance and detect what’s in it instantly.
In the early days they didn’t know if what they were doing (analysing drugs and giving them back or keeping them to be destroyed) was even legal, but they did it anyway.
For nearly two decades ANKORS has pushed the bar, setting an industry-leading precedent for harm reduction strategies. Lessons learned at Shambhala Music Festival in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies are used to inform drug programmes all over the world.
When Adam volunteered to be on the crew for Shambhala he didn’t know what he was buying into - but now he does — and he’s proud as hell to call these amazing people his friends.
They’re all really sad that they can’t be together this year because of Covid-19 but ANKORS works tirelessly in the community all year round to help reduce the harm that illegal drug use can cause.
More good people doing good things.
