I Walked Around a Music Festival Asking to Test People's ...

"We've still got plenty left," one of the guys told me, proudly. "I'm going to hide the baggies by strapping them between my cock and balls. Do it every year. Works a charm."

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Landing on the Isle of Wight, I jumped in a cab with two guys from London. We were all on our way to Bestival, the last big British festival of the summer, and my fare-sharers were obviously anticipating a big one, having each taken a couple of pills before crossing the Solent.

Arriving at the festival on the Friday, a day after it had kicked off, I made my way past the drug amnesty bins lining the entrance, peering inside as I got closer to the gates. Most were pretty much empty, or full of cardboard. Clearly, those planning to deplete their serotonin over the long weekend were willing to risk the heavily advertised bag searches and sniffer dogs in order to do so.

Having pitched up my tent, I headed straight into the campsites, ready to convince hungover strangers to give me bits of their drugs so I could ruin them in a test tube.

I too was interested in all the bagged-up stuff strapped to people's genitals, but not for the same reasons as the police and security officers manning the entrances. I'd brought with me a pile of home drug testing kits, which allow you to measure the purity of your narcotic substance and see what else it's been cut with. Reason being: I wanted to find out exactly what young people are ramming into their bodies at high speed during British music festivals, and if they care that it might all be full of nasty cutting agents used to de-worm farm animals.

"Nope, not a cop," I'd reply, which consistently—and surprisingly easily—reassured people that I was safe to be trusted; that I wouldn't handcuff them and confiscate all the drugs they'd spent the past week painstakingly WhatsApping about, before one of them handed a man named "Frosty" $1,000 in an Aldi car park.

"Are you a cop?" was the most common response I'd get. "Because if you're a narc, you can fuck right off."

The major cutting agent in these samples was benzocaine, a pharmaceutical drug used in dental anesthetic and throat sprays. It's regularly used to cut cocaine because it numbs your gums when you rub it on them, which—as you'll know from television—is a sure sign that what you've been sold is the genuine article.

Cocaine didn't seem too popular, with only six groups of the 35 I asked claiming to have any. Three of the samples were from London, and all of it was exactly as good as I'd expected—i.e. not very good, given that the coke you buy in London is almost definitely not high-purity . Each sample came in at "medium cocaine content," which, according to the experts behind the tests, puts it somewhere around the 40 percent purity mark.

"I've been buying coke from this dealer for months now, and if I'd tested this shit before then I'd have never gone near it again," the man from Reading told me. "I'll probably still do it this weekend, mind, as I've got it already—but once I'm back I'll be looking for someone new."

One guy who'd picked up his coke in Reading got a nasty surprise when the sample turned green, signaling the presence of Levamisole in the $120-per-gram flake. In 2014, a government minister claimed that up to four-fifths of cocaine in the UK was cut with this veterinary medicine, used to de-worm livestock like horses and cows. Latin American producers use it to bulk up coke because it elicits vaguely similar effects to the drug when used by humans. Thing is, it also has a nasty habit of suppressing our white blood cell production and making our skin rot.

Unsurprisingly, this field in the Isle of Wight wasn't a hotbed for high-purity cocaine from anywhere else outside the capital, either; the remaining tests showed little cocaine content and substantial levels of lidocaine, which, like benzocaine, numbs the skin and gums. Benzocaine and lidocaine can be purchased for as little as $15 a kilo, with resale value up to $77,000 when mixed and sold as cocaine—so you can see the appeal for dealers.

When testing pills, we were looking to see if they contained pure ecstasy or were cut with other chemical compounds. Three groups from Brighton each turned up with some bright yellow pingers, samples of which went purple in the test tube, confirming high levels of ecstasy. Two samples from Manchester also seemed clean.

Harry from Catford had got his hands on some pills late the previous night. "I nabbed some off a bloke in the Big Top [tent] last night while Action Bronson was smoking a spliff up on stage," he told me.

All of this lot seemed very pleased that they'd let me chip away at their drugs.

At $30 a pop, his three pills were convincingly pricey, but he'd taken one there and it'd had no effect. After some extensive testing (I tested every other sample over the weekend three times to ensure I was getting the right results; I tested his six times) and a trip to the chemist, we concluded it was almost definitely half an orange-flavoured Rennie, a heartburn pill that's never made anyone hug a complete stranger before telling them, in excruciating, emotional detail, about their parents' divorce.

"To be honest, it tasted a bit like a Rennie," sighed Harry, before heading off through the guy-ropes to sell his pills on to someone else.

"To be honest, I definitely won't take this," said Sarah from Portsmouth, whose pill tested positive for ecstasy and what appeared to be traces of PMA—a chemical that may be responsible for more than 100 deaths in the UK, including those of three men earlier this year. PMA is far stronger, and far more toxic, than the MDMA compound (the stuff you're supposed to find in ecstasy pills), proven to kill at lower doses. It can also take much longer to come up on PMA, meaning people will often take another pill before the effects of the first have kicked in, compounding the danger.

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Another pill sample showed up a mix of ecstasy and DXM (dextromethorphan), which was a little worrying—DXM is a substance you'll find in cough syrup that, in high doses, can make you feel a bit out of it, and when mixed with ecstasy and a night of jumping around leaves you much more prone to heatstroke.

Alice from Cornwall's sample didn't show as having any MDMA whatsoever. "I'm a little bit worried now," she said as we stared at the liquid in the test failing to identify her powder. "I took half a gram of this stuff last night and I did feel something, but now I've got no fucking clue what exactly I've been taking."

Having tested 15 samples from around the UK, the purity of most people's MDMA powder was high. Two groups from Wales came back with low MDMA content, but none of our tests could decipher what else was mixed in their wraps.

I suppose we'll never know for sure. However, one thing I do know is that the two samples I tested didn't seem to react whatsoever, which presumably means they were either 100 percent pure or just ground-up chalk. Or the tests weren't working. Or I didn't do it right. The long and short of it: Testing ketamine was a massive washout.

I planned on testing ketamine while I was there, but only two people I approached admitted to having some with them. Perhaps Bestival-goers were just too embarrassed to admit they still take K? Or maybe the ketamine drought of 2014 is somehow still profoundly affecting availability in 2015? Or perhaps everyone with some on them was just K-holing in their tents as I did my rounds?

Unlike some of the people we spoke to, Alice knew her dealer well, so took out her phone and started sending him angry snapchats.

While they provided some insight into the kind of drugs people were taking, my tests were by no means comprehensive, and the kits I used are just a start; machines costing thousands can be used to work out exactly what's in a compound. In fact, Dr. Adam Winstock of the Global Drug Survey has argued that home-testing kits, like the ones I used, are simply not suited to giving a foolproof reading. "There's real limitations to what it can tell you," he's noted in the past.