With FVDED taking over Holland Park in Surrey this weekend (July 3 and 4), the summer festival season has arrived in B.C. Following FVDED are the Pemberton Music Festival, July 16 to 19, and then the Squamish Valley Music Festival, August 7 to 9.

Each event will attract thousands of people, and with EDM more popular than ever, at least a few of those partygoers will take ecstasy. Or, to be more accurate, they will take pills that were sold to them as ecstasy. A Nelson-based group warns that many of those drugs won’t contain any MDMA (the chemical compound to which the street name ecstasy applies).

For more than a decade now, AIDS Network Kootenay Outreach and Support Society (ANKORS) has collected data on drugs that people have brought to the Shambhala Music Festival, a smaller gathering that happens each August in the Salmo River Valley of southern B.C.

In a telephone interview, ANKORS’s Chloe Sage described what they found in 2014: “Thirty percent of the MDMA we tested was negative,” she told the Straight. However, Sage emphasized that does not mean that 70 percent of pills sold as ecstasy were pure MDMA, or even that they contained much of it.

“This was not a purity test,” she explained. “So if it tests positive, that does not mean there were no other substances in there. And dealers are very savvy. They will have a little MDMA in there and a whole bunch of other stuff. Assume that your substance is adulterated. Always assume that.”

ANKORS’s historical data suggests that the quality of B.C.’s party drugs is on the decline. In 2003, less than five percent of the drugs ANKORS tested read negative for the substance the user anticipated. In 2014, that number exceeded 30 percent.

Sage listed a number of substances they are finding sold as ecstasy. Those ranged from well-known street drugs such as methamphetamine (meth) and ketamine (special k) to newer designed drugs such as cathinone, the substance sold as “bath salts” that has attracted negative press for the intensity of the bad trips it can cause.

A February 2014 study by researchers with the University of Alberta did look at purity. According to that paper, published in Drug Science, Policy and Law, only three percent of so-called ecstasy tablets seized by authorities in 2007 were made up of pure MDMA. That was down from 69 percent in 2001.

Warren Michelow has worked with ANKORS in the past with more of a focus on the habits of recreational drug users. He told the Straight less MDMA in ecstasy pills doesn’t bother everybody.

“I don’t think it would be accurate to say that what people are looking for is pure MDMA or that any deviation from pure MDMA is problematic,” he said. “What they want is something to keep them dancing all night.”

Michelow added this preference for a mix has actually changed the definition of the word ecstasy, where the term is now used with more flexibility and understood by both dealers and buyers as no longer reserved strictly for pills consisting only of MDMA.

While quality has declined, risks have increased. According to B.C. Coroners Service statistics, ecstasy-related deaths in the province climbed from seven in 2006 to a high of 23 in 2008 before dropping down to 11 in 2012.