ViceLab is the research, intelligence, and instrument layer that powers the entire ecosystem. Not just a database of drug facts — a living system for translating evidence into tools people actually use.
Most harm reduction exists at the edges — a stall at a festival, a pamphlet in a waiting room, a hotline number. It's disconnected from the environment where risk actually happens, and it's rarely built with the end user in mind.
ViceLab is structured to close that gap. It produces the evidence base, operational frameworks, and design instruments that allow harm reduction to work in context — at night, under pressure, with people who are already there.
This is not academic research that ends in a journal. It is applied intelligence — built to be translated, deployed, and used. Every output from ViceLab feeds directly into Cooked Pilot's real-time tools and VibeGuard's compliance infrastructure.
The four operating domains are research, systems design, substance intelligence, and educational instruments. They are not separate workstreams — they are a single, integrated capability.
ViceLab feeds evidence and operational intelligence into every layer of the ecosystem. These are the six primary areas it powers.
Structured knowledge about substances, combinations, dose ranges, and risk factors — updated against field conditions, not just academic databases. The foundation everything else builds on.
Education materials designed for people in live environments, not waiting rooms. Plain language, accurate information, no moralising. Built for the moment of actual use.
Combination risk mapping — what happens when substances interact, what the warning signs look like, and how to communicate that quickly and accurately to someone who needs to act.
Best-practice guidance on paraphernalia and consumption instruments — harm-reducing practices that reduce vectors of injury and contamination without requiring abstinence or clinical intervention.
The intelligence layer behind Cooked Pilot — real-time alerts, crowd-sourced substance reports, and peer-check frameworks. Evidence without operational tools is not enough.
Anonymised safety analytics and briefing materials for festival medical and welfare teams. Situational awareness without surveillance. Designed to improve organisers' duty-of-care capacity.
Structured substance profiles covering pharmacology, risk windows, combination flags, and harm-reduction pathways. Maintained for field accuracy, not academic completeness.
Academic and clinical research made operationally usable. Not summaries — instruments. Field guides, decision frameworks, and briefing materials that workers can deploy on the night.
Risk matrices for substance combinations — visual, navigable, and designed for fast comprehension under real-world conditions. The kind of tool that can prevent harm in the moment.
Paraphernalia best-practice guidance — which instruments, which formats, which consumption methods reduce contamination, overdose risk, and transmission vectors. Practically useful, not performative.
End-to-end educational design — from content architecture to visual format. Materials that work in the field: low-barrier entry, high information density, no clinical scaffolding required.
Harm reduction embedded at the product and environment level — not added as an afterthought. Systems thinking that asks: how does this design reduce risk before anyone has to ask for help?
"The gap between what people do at festivals and what the infrastructure around them acknowledges — that gap is where harm lives."
Festival and nightlife environments are not neutral. They are high-stimulation, high-uncertainty spaces where people make decisions quickly and with incomplete information. The infrastructure designed to support them — vague messaging, overworked welfare teams, no substance-specific guidance — is not built for that reality.
The dominant response to drug use at events is still either enforcement or silence. Neither reduces harm. What works is accurate, non-judgmental, operationally useful information — delivered in context, at the right moment, by systems people can trust.
ViceLab exists to build that. Not as a campaign, not as a clinical service, and not as a surveillance tool. As a research and intelligence infrastructure that makes the people already working in these environments substantially more capable.
Substance adulteration is increasing. Pressed pill markets are increasingly contaminated with fentanyl analogues, benzodiazepines, and novel psychoactives. Most welfare teams are not equipped to communicate this accurately in real time.
Combination risk is underestimated. The majority of serious adverse events at festivals involve multiple substances. Interaction information is rarely available at the point it's needed.
Information doesn't reach people. Existing harm reduction materials are often written for clinicians, filed in places nobody looks, or formatted in ways that fail in a nighttime environment.
Organisers lack operational cover. Most event organisers have no documented safety infrastructure beyond first aid. This creates liability exposure and leaves welfare teams operating without shared intelligence.
ViceLab is the foundation layer. Cooked Pilot and VibeGuard are delivery mechanisms. Each is independent — each is more powerful because of the others.
Produces the evidence base, substance intelligence, educational instruments, interaction frameworks, and instrument best-practice guidance that all downstream products depend on. Updated continuously against field conditions.
The consumer-facing application that delivers ViceLab intelligence directly to festival-goers. Real-time substance alerts, peer check-in tools, the Wingmate system, and MAYDAY escalation — all built on ViceLab's evidence base and operating within its ethical framework.
Safety operations and compliance infrastructure for event organisers. Crowd intelligence from Cooked Pilot, combined with ViceLab's analytical frameworks, becomes documented evidence of duty of care. Useful to welfare leads, medical teams, and anyone who signs the licence.
ViceLab works across sectors. The intelligence is the same — the way it's applied varies by audience.
ViceLab provides the evidence base for safer-event policy, the instruments to brief welfare teams, and the frameworks that make VibeGuard operationally useful. This is how you build something defensible.
Field guides, substance profiles, and interaction maps designed for nighttime environments. Information that's accurate, fast to use, and built to be trusted by the people who need it in the moment.
ViceLab's materials are open to partner organisations. We're actively building embedded partnerships with organisations working in the field. If you want to collaborate, not just consume resources, this is the right conversation.
Academic researchers, public health institutions, and drug policy organisations whose work feeds into applied harm reduction. ViceLab bridges the gap between peer-reviewed evidence and operational use.
Cooked Pilot is the consumer layer, but ViceLab's educational materials are available to communities, crew, volunteers, and anyone who wants to be more capable in a high-risk environment.
ViceLab is building something with longevity — a research and intelligence layer that improves with scale. If you're interested in funding harm reduction that produces compounding returns, this is the right level to invest at.
These are not aspirational values. They are operating constraints — things that are true of every output ViceLab produces, or it doesn't leave the lab.
Every claim is traceable to a source. Where the evidence is contested, we say so. We don't paper over uncertainty with confident language. The field moves; so does our understanding.
We build for people who are already making decisions, not people we're trying to persuade not to. Moralising is not harm reduction. It is the thing harm reduction exists to replace.
Risk reduction is built into every product, not bolted on as a feature. We design for the failure mode first, then the experience. This is what makes the tools trustworthy.
We understand the environments we're operating in. Night economies, music culture, festival contexts — these have specific social codes. Tools that ignore that don't get used.
Every output has a use case. If we can't explain who uses it, when, and in what conditions — it doesn't get published. This applies to research, tools, and materials equally.
We are not a data collection operation. No identifiable data. No behavioural tracking. No selling information back up the chain. Safety systems that require surveillance to function are not safety systems — they're risk to the people using them.
Whether you're building in harm reduction, running events, funding infrastructure, or producing research — there is a meaningful way to connect with what ViceLab is building.
Start the conversation