Scotland’s first local drug-checking service will open in Glasgow on 5 October, allowing people to submit illicit drugs for rapid analysis and receive information about what they contain. But access will not be open to everyone: Home Office licence conditions restrict the service to adults who are dependent on one or more illicit drugs.
Scotland’s first local drug-checking service will open next month at Hunter Street in Glasgow, adding chemical analysis of street drugs to a site that already houses some of the country’s most closely watched harm-reduction services.
From Monday 5 October, people admitted to the service will be able to hand over a drug sample for rapid checking and receive information about what has been detected, alongside advice intended to reduce the risks associated with taking it.
The principle is straightforward. A person may believe that a substance is heroin, a benzodiazepine or another drug, but the illicit market provides no reliable label showing what is actually in it, how strong it is or whether another substance has been added. Drug checking attempts to replace some of that uncertainty with chemical evidence.
The Glasgow service will not, however, be available to everyone who uses illegal drugs.
Under the conditions attached to the Home Office licence, Scottish drug-checking services will be restricted to people aged over 18 who are dependent on one or more illicit drugs.
That creates a defined boundary around Scotland’s first service. An adult with drug dependence can potentially use it. Someone using an illicit substance recreationally or intermittently, without meeting the service’s dependence requirement, falls outside the group specified by the licence.
The restriction is particularly significant because drug checking performs two different jobs.
For the individual, it can provide information about a substance before further use. For the wider public-health system, every sample can become another piece of evidence about what is circulating in the illegal drug market.
Samples initially examined in Glasgow will also be sent to a new National Testing and Research Laboratory at the University of Dundee, where more detailed analysis can be carried out. Information from that laboratory will feed into Scotland’s drug surveillance and early-warning system, helping health services identify emerging substances and changes in the composition of the illicit supply.
The laboratory is based at the University of Dundee’s Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science. It has been developed to support local drug-checking facilities planned for Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.
The Scottish Government has committed more than £1.7 million to the pilot programme.
Glasgow will be first to open. Aberdeen and Dundee have now also received the Home Office licences required for their services, with preparations continuing for both. Edinburgh is working towards its own licence application.
The Glasgow service will operate at 55 Hunter Street, alongside but legally separate from The Thistle, Glasgow’s safer drug consumption facility.
The Thistle allows people to consume drugs they already possess under clinical supervision. The drug-checking service will analyse samples and provide information about their contents. Although both operate from the same Hunter Street health and social care site, they are separate services operating under different legal arrangements.
The need for a Home Office licence arises because possession and supply of controlled drugs remain governed principally by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and related regulations, matters reserved to Westminster.
That has shaped the development of the Scottish project from the beginning.
A two-year Scottish Drug Checking Project, led by the University of Stirling and funded through the Drug Deaths Taskforce, was completed in May 2023. Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen were subsequently identified for the first local facilities.
The work then moved from research into implementation: designing procedures, deciding how samples could legally be transported, choosing equipment and preparing controlled-drug licence applications.
Dundee and Aberdeen submitted applications to the Home Office in March 2024. Glasgow followed that summer.
The Glasgow licence was approved in October 2025.
The first service will therefore open more than three years after the underlying Scottish research project moved towards practical implementation.
During that period, the composition of Scotland’s illicit drug supply has continued to change.
Public Health Scotland’s RADAR system has repeatedly warned about substances appearing in drugs sold as something else. Nitazene-type synthetic opioids have been detected in drug-related harms and deaths, including in substances believed by users to be heroin or benzodiazepines.
More recently, Public Health Scotland has reported the emergence of medetomidine, a potent veterinary sedative related to xylazine, in drugs sold as heroin and benzodiazepines.
The significance is not simply that new drugs are appearing. People may consume them without knowing they are present.
Public Health Scotland reported that nitazenes were found in 12 per cent of post-mortem toxicology samples testing positive for a controlled drug between April and June 2025. Its later surveillance has continued to describe the illegal opioid and depressant markets as volatile, with substances changing as international controls and supply routes change.
Scotland’s new testing network is intended to create another source of intelligence closer to the point at which drugs are actually being used.
A substance handed into Hunter Street may first produce information for the person who submitted it. More extensive testing in Dundee can then help identify wider patterns, including unexpected compounds, adulterants and emerging synthetic drugs.
That information can feed into RADAR, the national Rapid Action Drug Alerts and Response system used to monitor changes in drugs, harms and health-service activity.
In that sense, the new service sits somewhere between a clinical intervention and a surveillance network.
Internationally, drug checking is not a single standardised service. The European Union Drugs Agency records services operating from permanent community sites, laboratories, festivals and drug consumption facilities across a number of European countries. The technology ranges from relatively simple tests capable of identifying particular substances to more advanced laboratory systems capable of analysing composition and strength.
The European agency says drug-checking information has become useful for monitoring drug-market changes and feeding early-warning systems, while evidence about its effect on individual risk-taking remains more limited.
A systematic review of 90 studies published in the journal Addiction reached a similar conclusion. Drug checking was well established as a means of monitoring unregulated drug markets, while studies also found changes in intended or actual behaviour particularly when testing revealed unexpected substances or drugs considered particularly dangerous.
Scotland’s model is narrower at the front door than some drug-checking systems operating elsewhere.
European services include facilities aimed at recreational drug users and services operating at music festivals. Scotland’s first licensed sites are instead being targeted, under Home Office criteria, at adults dependent on illicit drugs.
The Scottish Government’s longer-term strategy is already looking beyond the initial fixed-site pilot.
Its 2026–35 Alcohol and Drugs Strategic Plan says the Government intends to explore wider access to drug checking, including possible mobile services and postal models, while the Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh pilots are evaluated.
Those ambitions would still have to operate within the legal framework governing controlled drugs.
The Scottish strategy explicitly acknowledges that several harm-reduction interventions used internationally remain restricted under the Misuse of Drugs Act and says ministers will continue discussing further measures with the UK Government.
The Glasgow service therefore represents both an expansion of Scottish drugs policy and an example of its constitutional limits.
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PubMed record
