Horizon Scans
Key Messages
What Is the Issue?
- Canada continues to experience a toxic drug crisis driven by an increasingly complex and rapidly changing unregulated drug supply.
- Drug-checking services help identify substances and contaminants in unregulated drug samples, supporting harm reduction and public health responses.
- In response to the ongoing toxic drug crisis, new drug-checking technologies (DCTs) are emerging. Further research could help determine how these technologies might complement established options to address existing challenges — such as detecting low-concentration substances, novel psychoactive substances, and complex drug mixtures — and improve access to drug-checking services.
What Are the Technologies?
- Many emerging DCTs are portable, hand-held, or field-deployed, and are designed for use outside traditional laboratory settings while still offering the potential for high analytical performance.
- Emerging DCTs include portable Raman spectroscopy, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, near-infrared spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy combined with machine learning, portable mass spectrometry, sensor-based technologies, and multitechnology approaches.
- We searched key resources, including journal citation databases, and conducted a focused internet search for relevant evidence published since 2011.
What Is the Potential Impact?
- Initial studies suggest emerging DCTs may improve the detection of low-concentration substances, contaminants, novel psychoactive substances, and complex drug mixtures.
- Portable devices may expand access to drug-checking services in underserved communities as well as mobile, rural, remote, and event-based settings.
- Emerging DCTs may provide timely and detailed information about substance compositions, contaminants, and novel psychoactive substances. This information may support people who use drugs, harm-reduction services, health care providers, public health agencies, and surveillance programs in identifying trends in the unregulated drug supply.
- No single technology demonstrated advantages across all analytical and operational areas. Although emerging technologies demonstrate encouraging analytical performance, the technologies differ in sensitivity, portability, analysis time, training requirements, dependence on reference libraries, costs, and implementation needs.
- Combining emerging technologies with complementary established technologies may improve substance detection compared with relying on a single technology alone.
What Else Do We Need to Know?
- This Horizon Scan complements a 2026 Canada’s Drug Agency Health Technology Review by providing an overview of emerging DCTs and early evidence on their potential applications. The previous review evaluated established DCTs, while this Horizon Scan highlights technologies that are still evolving and where evidence remains limited. Emerging DCTs may complement, rather than replace, established DCTs and laboratory-based methods, which continue to play an important role in drug-checking services, including the identification and confirmation of novel or unexpected substances.
- Several emerging DCTs have been evaluated in community drug-checking settings, particularly in Canada; however, evidence is still limited for many technologies and consists largely of preliminary studies.
- More studies are required to better understand the accuracy, reliability, costs, and real-world implementation of these technologies. Further, evidence synthesis with critical appraisal will be necessary to provide conclusive statements about their performance.
- Decision-makers may need to balance analytical performance with feasibility, workforce capacity, infrastructure requirements, costs, and equitable access when considering implementation.