How can we dramatically increase drug testing and reduce addiction through a product or service?
The fentanyl epidemic has rapidly consumed our nation and is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18–45. The drug testing solutions available seem to dramatically misunderstand the recreational user, given how uncommon testing is among ravers, clubbers, and other casual drug users. From our unique and granular understanding of recreational drug users, my business partner and I ideated UserFriendly, an inventive drug testing solution that will motivate testing and decrease addictions. UserFriendly is an electronic drug testing device with a friendly, toy-like design meant to be carried on a keychain. Our device is easy-to-use, discrete, and fun, satisfying all customer pain points.
What do we know that everyone else doesn’t?
Our research phase began with recreational drug users, dealers, and some of the leading experts on fentanyl and drug use. We also went to bars, clubs, and concerts and observed drug-use behavior at the ground level to get a high-fidelity understanding of the issue. Recreational users painted a unique and conflicting portrait: despite awareness of the upsurging fentanyl epidemic, many recreational users never or rarely ever test their drugs. Of the dozens of self-reported recreational drug users we spoke to, only a handful reported regularly testing their drug supplies. We unearthed several key pain points that explain why testing is so uncommon:
Recreational drug tests are difficult to come across, and must be ordered online
Drug use is spontaneous and unpredictable, and the unavailability of tests makes testing even less likely
It is difficult to test in bars, clubs, and other venues due to crowd density and illegal status of paraphernalia
Perhaps the most concerning insight we exposed is that the only legitimate barrier to drug-usage is certainty that a batch of a recreational drug is laced. Fear or doubt regarding the purity of a drug supply is not enough to deter drug usage.
Ideating A Solution that Increases Testing
Yet another major takeaway about our business idea is its scale: we learned what it is not. We found that we are not building a comprehensive solution to synthetic opioid addiction. Recreational drug users are profoundly distinct in their drug use behavior than individuals addicted to opioids. The latter will require a much-needed albeit massively different solution. Instead, UserFriendly is to drug testing what seatbelts are for cars: we won’t eliminate overdose deaths or addiction, but we can reduce risky behavior for those who desire to be safer. The UserFriendly customer is someone who regularly attends raves or musical festivals or goes to bars and clubs on the weekend after work, between ages 18 and 35, is an early-career professional, and consumes drugs on a weekly to monthly basis as a form of recreation: they are not an addict. Based on the pain points we unearthed about drug testing, we designed to:
Make it easy, especially for intoxicated users in crowded social settings like raves
Make it available, accessible to users in spontaneous situations and without planning
Make it fun, to motivate testing among younger demographics
With these constraints in mind, we ideated a product which solved for all of the major pain points: a handheld, electronic drug-testing device meant to be carried on a keychain with a discreet, character-based design modeled after the iconic Tamagotchi fad toy from the early 2000’s. The device is easy to use, leveraging the most simple reagent-testing process available, further simplifying the testing procedure with an automated internal process triggered by the push of a button. It is available, meant to be latched on a user’s keychain with a subscription service for regular, monthly shipments of the internal reagent solutions. The product is inconspicuous, designed to look like a standard keychain toy to eliminate suspicion and help users get this device into venues. It is fun and trendy, leveraging the turn-of-the-millenia design aesthetic and interactive features of a keychain pet, motivating users to carry the device and use it more frequently.
Our business model is simple: the body of the device itself is a one-time payment, while the cartridges holding the reagent solution needed for testing are available as a mailed monthly subscription of five or ten tests per month.
How big is this issue?
We are currently in the third wave of the opioid crisis in the United States. Illicit drug producers lace their products with fentanyl to lower prices and drive addiction. 71,000 people died from fentanyl overdose in 2021. 76% of those deaths were in people ages 14–23. Shockingly, one person in the United States dies from fentanyl overdose every seven minutes, the equivalent of a Boeing Jet crashing and killing every person on board every day.
The size of the market for drug testing solutions is difficult to estimate, but we can look at some proxies to get a better idea: Americans spend around $150 billion a year on cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine (all can potentially be laced with fentanyl). For perspective, they spend around $158 billion on alcohol every year. In 2019, the CDC reported that 13% of Americans aged 12 years and over used an illicit drug in the past month (nearly 43 million individuals). In other countries, the numbers are even less defined but similarly compelling.
While the legal landscape and social taboo around drug use make this a particularly difficult area to work in, we believe that we have identified a legitimate gap in the market and generated a business model and value proposition that solves all customer pain points. The legal landscape is shifting, however, and this device and business model are viable given the sheer size of the illicit drug market, which other solutions have only marginally tapped into.
You can sign up for our waitlist here: https://www.userfriendly.club
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