A SAFER SUPPLY THROUGH SCIENCE

PA Groundhogs is a provider of drug checking services and drug supply intelligence and monitoring infrastructure. We employ mass spectrometry technology to develop regional profiles of the illicit drug supply for public health agencies, harm reduction organizations, treatment providers, clinicians and people who use drugs. Through our affiliation with the Center for Forensic Science, Research & Education (CFSRE) in Horsham, PA—a federally certified Schedule 1 lab—we provide forensic-grade drug sample analysis that gives people who use drugs, and the organizations that serve them, unprecedented transparency into what's actually in the supply.

We are one of the only operational mail-in drug checking programs in the United States that accepts whole street drug samples for full mass spectrometry analysis. This allows us to analyze changes in drug purity as well as composition, and identify new psychoactive substances — proactively alerting communities about dangerous contaminants, strong batches, and novel analogs.

OUR GOALS

Increase transparency for people who use drugs by providing both point-of-use drug testing equipment (immunoassay test strips) and mass spectrometry analysis of individual drug samples;
Compile a data repository that can track changes in purity and composition of the illicit drug supply in near real-time and employ “anticipatory intelligence”— a relatively new approach to public health that combines information and data from multiple disciplines–in an effort to forecast where high potency or tainted batches of illicit drugs are most likely to hit next;
Connect and analyze drug supply data from across the country through our Partnership Programs—which offer organizations & public health agencies a way to begin their own scalable, low-cost mail-based drug checking programs without reinventing the wheel.
Improve drug-user health through a network of researchers & medical advisors that use our data to educate the clinical community on fluctuations in drug composition and purity to ensure they are providing tolerance-appropriate pain and/or withdrawal management for drug-dependent patients.