The festivalgoers that found their way to the Bunk Police offered a slice of the culture. There was Smiley, the twentysomething likely on MDMA in a tie-dye shirt and blue vest, who was over-the-top nice and enthusiastic about harm reduction. There was the guy in a “Percipher” T-shirt – showing a cat bearing a cross on its forehead – who asked me if I had any drugs before showing me how to do a “renegade,” which is shotgunning a beer by using only your thumb to punch a hole in the can. There was the young woman in fishnets, cradling a giant, inflatable penis, yelling, “Who has that neon dick?”

Auctor doesn’t consider himself part of this culture. He doesn’t take drugs at festivals, but he cares about the festivalgoers who do. And he’s trying to bring logic into their substance-taking experience. When Auctor, an Eagle Scout with a business background, started the Bunk Police in 2011, he was a complete outsider. He had always been fascinated with the music festival culture, and was well-aware of the health incidents occurring at the festivals due to adulterated or misrepresented drugs. But after years of what he called “sketchy situations and mistaken intentions,” he found the confidence needed to be a leader in on-site testing at music festivals.

“The f--- it culture needs to end,” he said.

While distributing $5,000 worth of kits that night – just a fraction of the thousands of kits they sell and distribute a year – we meet up with the guys with the chocolate chip cookies. They had a quick question about the opium – or what they thought was opium – they were smoking. Auctor recognized something was wrong.

“If this is opium, then I quit,” Auctor told them.

“We’ve been smoking it, and we’ve been fine,” one of the women at the campsite replied.

Without blinking, Auctor offered a verdict: “You should feed that to the Porta-John.”

Even with a grueling schedule that has him on the road throughout the summer for festivals or research in Europe on thin-layer chromatography, the next generation for consumer testing kits, Auctor maintains that he’ll keep pushing forward in the harm reduction movement for as long as it takes – no matter the risk.

“This is the path I’ve chosen for myself,” he said. “This is my whole life.”