{"id":504802,"date":"2026-07-01T16:59:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/504802\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T16:59:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:59:19","slug":"drug-checking-service-identifies-other-substance-sold-as-ghb-in-wellington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/504802\/","title":{"rendered":"Drug checking service identifies other substance sold as GHB in Wellington"},"content":{"rendered":"

A drug harm reduction service is encouraging people to get substances such as GHB tested.<\/p>\n

It comes after one person died and five others were hospitalised following a string of suspected overdoses<\/a> of the fantasy drug GHB in Wellington in recent days.<\/p>\n

A woman died at Woofingtons, a castle-like mansion in Wellington after drinking GHB from a bottle, her friend earlier told RNZ<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are a group of three “G-type” substances – GHB, GBL and 14BD.<\/p>\n

DISC Trust national harm reduction lead Jason George said sometimes one G-type drug was sold as another.<\/p>\n

“In the last week, we’ve had a couple of G-type substances come through our clinic, and at least one of those involved GHB, what was presumed to be GHB, turning out to be 14BD.”<\/p>\n

He said when people thought what they were taking was something else, they could think it wasn’t working and end up taking more to get the effects they were looking for.<\/p>\n

“Then it comes on a bit later and ends up being stronger than intended and people can accidentally overdose or take a bit more than they wanted to.”<\/p>\n

He said just tenths of a ml could be the difference between “having a good time” or “having a really bad time”.<\/p>\n

Getting drugs tested he said could reduce overdoses.<\/p>\n

“If you haven’t had it checked, there’s really no way of knowing that it’s what it was sold to you as, so we really recommend coming into a drug checking service.<\/p>\n

“That way [if] you’re going to take it you know it is what you think it is.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A drug harm reduction service is encouraging people to get substances such as GHB tested. It comes after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-504802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}