10 key findings related to the impact of Toronto’s Drug Checking Service

The 10 key findings are: (1) Drug checking provides potentially life-saving information to those at highest risk of overdose; (2) Drug checking facilitates behaviour change; (3) Drug checking provides a gateway to accessing harm reduction services; (4) Drug checking services enable monitoring of the unregulated drug market and public dissemination of drug market trends in real time; (5) Drug checking informs clinicians and care; (6) Drug checking findings improve health and social services; (7) Drug checking empowers PWUD to advocate for themselves and help develop solutions that impact them; (8) Drug checking generates evidence to support advocacy for services and safer alternatives for PWUD; (9) Toronto’s Drug Checking Service has created turnkey solutions for other organizations and jurisdictions to establish local drug checking programs, increasing system efficiencies and limiting redundancy; (10) Drug checking is valuable to PWUD.

The report concludes with two recommendations: (1) Formally integrating drug checking into the suite of harm reduction services in Ontario and across Canada; and (2) Committing to sufficient and long-term funding to sustain Toronto’s Drug Checking Service and scale drug checking service delivery across the province.