'Space vape' drug warning ahead of summer festival season

Drug experts are warning young New Zealanders to be cautious with "space vapes" during the summer festival season.

Space vapes are vape pods containing the drug etomidate, a dissociative anaesthetic drug that the NZ Drug Research Team's Dr Robin van der Sanden said was similar to ketamine.

"It has a legitimate medical use as a general anaesthetic, often for short-term medical procedures, and it produces this powerful but short-acting feeling of euphoria and sedation and physical numbness," she said.

Taking it outside of a medical environment carried risks.

"It's a bit of a volatile compound to take outside of medical supervision. It does often need to be quite precisely dosed, and in a medical operating theatre there'll be someone to check your airways are open and you're breathing properly," she said.

"The risks with vaping etomidate is this unpredictability of how strong the vape pod is and this increased chance for some potentially quite serious negative effects, which range from tremors and muscle spasms through to seizures and a loss of consciousness."

There was a risk the vapes would be shared at parties and festivals, and some New Zealanders might not realise what they were getting into, Dr van der Sanden said.

"The best option would be not to vape an e-liquid that you don't 100 percent know what's in it, or that you haven't purchased yourself. But it would also be good practice to take a small amount first, if you are going to take anything," she said.

Associate professor of criminology at Victoria University Fiona Hutton urged anyone who used space vapes to be upfront with their friends about what might be inside them.

"If you are using an illicit vape at a festival and you're going to be sharing it with other people, you should be really upfront to other people about what you think it contains, and of course what you think it contains may be different to what it actually contains," she said.

"Conversely, because we're likely to see a rise in illegal vapes at festivals this summer, if someone is offering you their vape it's probably a good idea to check in with them about what they think it contains."