The Government is providing $800,000 for drug-checkers at festivals.

Health Minister Andrew Little said “this is not about condoning drug use, but about keeping people safe.”

“There is clear evidence that having drug-checking services at festivals changes behaviour and reduces harm.”

Anyone attending events and festivals will need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Drug-checking services, in which drugs are checked to see if they are what people think they are, were legal for the first time last summer.

Forty per cent of what users thought was MDMA, or ecstasy, was found to be eutylone, a potentially dangerous synthetic cathinone also known as bath salts and linked to deaths overseas and hospitalisations in New Zealand.