FAQ

The scales are pre-calibrated but come with a 20g weight. You can hold down the “mode” button to select calibration, then press again, wait and add the 20g weight. This will reset the balance if it has become inaccurate.

It will produce a mixture of the colours – a lot like mixing two colours of paint. If you have a powder or crystalline substance with two different looking types of crystal, try to separate them and test them individually.

The kits are not illegal but this will depend on your individual airline. You should make sure they are transported inside their individual bags and stored upright because the low pressure on a plane can make them leak a tiny bit.

As far as we are aware fentanyl has not been found in any samples of MDMA in the UK. That does not tell us anything about how many samples could contain it in the future though so we can’t make a recommendation about this as such. It still seems the greatest risk for people who use MDMA is taking too much MDMA or a more typical adulterant/mis-selling.

This depends completely on the reagent you are using, and is the reason that we insist more than one reagent must be used on a sample. The marquis reagent alone would have a 0% chance of warning you about this. Please email us for more details.

The fentanyl strips are only for detecting fentanyl at this time.

It’s a plain white box with your address and a stamp, no signature required and fits through any letterbox over 25mm.

What kills reagents is moisture, oxygen and heat – the more you can keep these away, the longer the reagents will keep. This means that in some circumstances they can happily last 18 months or so. Well done for checking!

No, we have never disclosed any records to the government or police and comply fully with the Data Protection Act as well as having very strong morals that your information should not be shared. If you want to be extra certain then you can encrypt your details using PGP encryption, which we decrypt, print, and then destroy the details for.

The statement note is discreet and cannot be linked to us through google or other search engines (and we’re not going to post it here for exactly that reason!)

We don’t recommend freezing because the reagents can freeze and precipitate (un-dissolve) parts of the mixture.

Froehde and ehrlich aren’t susceptible to this and colder temperatures will slow down the reactions that cause them to degrade. Ensure they are in a sealed bag and are allowed to warm fully to room temperature before opening the bag.

It is strongly recommended to use more than one different reagent per sample as it gives the best chance of detecting something unexpected.

For example, a cocaine sample cut with paracetamol would show no reaction with the marquis reagent, but an obvious green result with mandelin.

The bottles have a built in dropping system so do not need pipettes

The reliability will be the same but the reagents won’t last quite as long. In our experience they will usually still get pretty close to a year but even at the best of times the shelf life varies so it’s hard to give a specific number. We find the froehde reagent lasts more than a year even when it is not refrigerated and the same for the ehrlich reagent – the reaction just takes a little longer.

In the modern “ecstasy” market a large majority of pills contain only MDMA. If you believe they contain something else then generally it is better to throw them away rather than try to guess how the extra components will affect the risk. Some people get around this issue by buying crystal MDMA which should never have other substances added.

Thank you for the kind comments 🙂 The less you open the reagents, the longer they will last. The froehde reagent lasts absolutely ages, often over a year, whereas the mecke and marquis reagents will only last a year even in an inert atmosphere because they spontaneously decay. If you want a long shelf-life selection I recommend froehde, mandelin and ehrlich but really for peace of mind I think it’s better to just spend the £15 annually.

The MDMA is destroyed by the test so you would need to use three crumbs for three tests. This is about 1/100th of a gram for all three

Definitely! We love talking about testing, please email admin at reagent-tests.uk.

The ehrlich reagent may be slow enough to need observing over 2 minutes but none of the other reagents are – 60 secs is plenty.

We are not aware of any countries in which reagent tests are illegal. The reagents are used in laboratories for testing other common compounds so banning them would be impractical.