On a blazing hot July day, young people in summer attire arrive in Beersville with coolers and tents packed into cars painted with flowers, happy faces and signs wishing everyone a “happy Evolve.” Inside the volunteer medic tent, things are quiet. Adam Mitchell has been a volunteer medic at Evolve for 10 years, and while most people here are looking out for each other, he says he worries about drug dealers getting in “to sell bad drugs to people and make them very ill.” Once festivalgoers have passed the police checkpoint at the end of the dirt road leading to the site and through a private security sweep of their vehicle, it’s time to set up their tents and “begin the journey” — a saying many use to describe their Evolve experience.

The first stop is a visit to Josh Watts, 31, an Evolve veteran from Halifax who’s been coming to the festival for 14 years. He spends almost the entire festival inside a tent with a yellow and white striped canopy and a sign advertising free drug testing.

Along with artist Zoe Tipney, 30, he’s organized 25 volunteers to help man the tent for the four-day event — independently of festival organizers. They have ear plugs, condoms and water to hand out and are armed with testing chemicals that can discern with some certainty whether or not a drug is what the person taking it thinks it is. A man in his early 20s stops by to test the cocaine he bought for the festival. Turns out, it is, indeed, cocaine and isn’t laced with anything else, at least not anything that Watts’s test can detect.

"Cocaine. Pure cocaine." Evolve festival attendee after having his drugs tested

The man says he’ll be back to have more drugs tested later. He returns to his tent to snort the drugs as the first of the weekend’s 130 acts takes the stage.

Inside the drug testing tent, Watts is joined by other harm-reduction volunteers. One off them is Greg Weins, an addictions counsellor who grew up going to Evolve every summer and flew from Toronto to continue the tradition this year. But this time, he’s back to help.