So far Miraculix hasn’t officially claimed that Matt and I violated their patent (they don’t have one). Nor did they put us on notice that they have a patent pending, which would be the proper process if they really thought their kits were novel and their application would succeed. But their German lawyer did not even mention the patent application in the cease and desist letter. This is likely because they know they will never be granted a patent for such a basic scientific process. Their application has already been rejected on nearly all counts of novelty and inventiveness by the International Searching Authority (ISA), who offers preliminary reviews on all patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

What’s more, Will MacHugh, Miraculix’s self-described US representative, told me in a phone call in 2023 (with Miraculix’s President, Mr. Felix Blei, present) that they always knew they would never be granted a patent, and that this was the reason they did not include the real formulas in their application. He said they believed it would be very difficult for anyone to figure out how to make similar kits, and so they didn’t want to make it easy for anyone by providing the formulas in a public application.

Perhaps they thought this was clever, but filing a patent application with incorrect information for the sole purpose of stifling competition clearly constitutes unfair competition and may violate antitrust laws. It also potentially supports a claim of patent misuse.

What this means is that the only thing Miraculix possibly has to come at me with is the NDA I signed in 2022. But that NDA only covers confidential information they provided me, and they never provided me with any confidential information regarding the three test kits in question.

Let’s be very specific. Their MDMA, LSD and psilocybin test kits were already commercialized and publicly available when I signed the NDA. I already had possession of them—and I had already assessed them—before ever even speaking to anyone with Miraculix. Section 9 of the NDA says:

This means that even if I did “reverse engineer” their kits (which I did not), I would have been within my rights to do so. The existence of these kits and any information that could be obtained from the physical kits themselves, were not confidential once Miraculix commercialized them and made them public. The NDA only covered kits that were currently in development by Miraculix. In fact, the reason I signed the NDA was because Miraculix told me they were developing other kits and they wanted to send me prototypes for my assessment. Section 5 in the NDA clearly states:

I was fine with this. And later in 2024 Miraculix also sent me prototypes of a fentanyl test kit they wanted me to field test for them. I did those tests in collaboration with the San Diego Harm Reduction Coalition, who collected seven street samples of fentanyl powder for me. The kits failed every single time. Nonetheless, I agree that I am beholden by the NDA not to reverse engineer them. (But why would I anyway—they didn’t work.)

The quantitative fentanyl test kits that Matt and I are currently working on have no relation whatsoever to those prototypes.

That’s the only confidential information and those are the only prototypes ever provided to me by Miraculix.

Did Miraculix have me sign an outdated NDA that was created when they were still developing their MDMA, LSD and psilocybin kits? Did they think the NDA still applied to those kits even after they had been publicly released? The fact that they are now trying to claim I violated that NDA suggests as much. But that’s not my problem. If they wanted to stop me from developing and distributing my own kits, they should have had me sign a noncompete agreement rather than an outdated NDA. (Of course, noncompetes themselves are often unenforceable.)

Or they could have developed their kits in an open source manner to begin with, the same way I developed many of the current test kits on the market. I never pretended the reagents I developed for harm reduction use (like Marquis, Morris, Liebermann, and others) were secret and proprietary. I named them using the common scientific conventions, crediting the original inventors and hence allowing anyone who wanted to produce them to do so (and many vendors now, in fact, do sell them around the world). This is how we advance the cause of harm reduction. This is how we improve public health and safety. It’s called collaboration.

Miraculix’s position is all the more interesting given their insinuation that Matt and I are inexperienced amateurs who could not possibly have developed quantitative test kits on our own since we did not partner with a University, like they did. I’ve been doing lab work and analytical chemistry specifically related to drug identification for nearly thirty years. I also would have had my lawyers draft a new NDA—or a noncompete agreement—if my goal was to prevent a potential distributor from competing with me.

Who’s the amateur?

I began working with Miraculix in late 2022 because I believed quantitative test kits were an important addition to consumer drug checking. I was always skeptical of vendors who claimed proprietary formulas, but I made an exception in this case because I believed I could popularize their kits in the US and help a lot of people. Miraculix, for their part, agreed to contract with me to be their exclusive US distributor.

I began selling their kits on a website I created for the US market (QTests.org) even before our contract negotiations were concluded, based on good faith and trust. But after six months Miraculix abandoned the negotiations and opened their own US distribution center in direct competition with me. This was after I had spent about $20,000 on custom boxes for the US market, edited much of their English-language material, and gave them invaluable marketing advice. (I have all of this documented in dozens of back and forth emails.)

Despite advice from my family and friends to “get the fuck away from them,” I continued over the next year to sell their kits through QTests.org. This was partly because I had spent so much money on custom boxes that I wanted to make some of that back. It was also during a tumultuous time for me because that summer (2023) most of the DanceSafe chapters revolted after the new executives stripped away their autonomy and centralized all their services. In an open letter to the board the chapters demanded their autonomy back. I supported them and when the board refused their demands, I left and helped the chapters start a new nonprofit, Grassroots Harm Reduction.

As a result of all this, Matt and I also created a new laboratory here in Albuquerque to manufacture all the standard reagents now sold by Grassroots Harm Reduction. Then once I felt settled financially (there was a year when I wasn’t sure how I would survive without my DanceSafe income), Matt and I began discussing the idea of developing new quantitative test kits. We started doing this in November of 2024, and we launched PurityTestKits.com in May of 2025.

We created our test kits using publicly available information and tremendous trial and error, performing more than 2,000 total tests. As described in my article, “How to Make a Purity Test Kit” (an article Miraculix is demanding in their cease and desist letter that we take down), the basic idea is to balance the strength and volume of the reagent with the amount of drug added in order to land on the Beer-Lambert spectrum. This is a narrow linear color spectrum that correlates with the concentration of substance dissolved in a solution—a physical law of analytical chemistry that dates back to the 18th century.

The way we adjusted the strength of the reagent is by varying the ratio of ingredients, including sulfuric acid, formaldehyde and ferric chloride. None of this is Miraculix’s trade secret. It’s common analytical chemistry. The methods do not belong to Miraculix, Felix Blei nor anyone else.

I personally call on Miraculix to withdraw their patent application, the existence of which only intimidates potential test kit manufacturers, stifling innovation and competition within the drug checking industry. It is a clear disservice to the harm reduction movement, and in the long run may potentially jeopardize people’s lives.