It’s a typical scene at summertime music festivals across Europe. But in England this summer, for the first time, revelers can have their illegal drugs tested before they take them. It’s part of a new project to prevent overdoses.

“I’ve been doing festivals for three to four years now. I like my Ecstasy pills,” says Rio Brown, 29, from Manchester, England. “If I want to chill out, I have my weed. If I want to party, I’ll have some cocaine or a pill or whatever.”

Brown just bought a bag of Ecstasy pills from a dealer who somehow smuggled them past the police and sniffer dogs at the festival gate. Ecstasy is the same psychoactive drug a teenager suffered a fatal overdose from at this same festival last year. That has Brown concerned.

So he and his friends take their baggie of drugs over to a festival tent labeled The Loop. It’s a nonprofit that conducts forensic testing of drugs, and it’s set up shop at U.K. music festivals for the first time this summer.

“[It’s] just to make sure we’re getting the right thing, really, to make sure it’s not harmful,” Brown explains. “We don’t want to kill ourselves, you know what I mean?”

Brown breaks off a fragment of one of his Ecstasy pills and hands it to Chris Brady, who works full-time as a drug counselor and educator for Britain’s public National Health Service, and volunteers on weekends with The Loop.

“We’re very realistic that people do take drugs, and what we want is to keep people safe,” Brady says. “We don’t want any mothers getting a call at 4 in the morning, saying that their son or daughter is ill, or even worse.”

In a tiny trailer behind the tent, volunteers conduct chemistry tests on pink and purple pills that look like children’s vitamins. It only takes about 15 minutes. The volunteers are professional chemists, Ph.D students and pharmaceutical researchers — all here on their own time.

“They give us one pill or a small scoop of powder, and they won’t get that back,” explains Fiona Measham, co-founder of The Loop. “Normally the substance is destroyed in the testing process. So there isn’t really anything left in our possession.”

That’s how they get around drug possession laws. In the U.S., similar groups give out self-testing drug kits.

Measham is a professor of criminology at Durham University in northern England, and a drug policy adviser to the British government. She has worked for decades with police, as a forensic drug expert, testing drugs found on overdose victims, to help paramedics know how to treat them.

But then Measham had an idea: Why wait until after the drugs are taken, to find out what’s in them?

She co-founded The Loop in 2013, and convinced police of the benefits of looking the other way, so that drug users can avoid being poisoned or suffering an overdose.

“One of the key things is to win the trust of people who are giving us illegal drugs. This isn’t an undercover police sting. Genuinely, it’s a health and welfare issue,” Measham says. “The police have been very supportive of that. So they don’t stand anywhere near the tent. We don’t want them to scare off potential customers.”

On this particular day, Measham has been testing for MDMA, the active ingredient in Ecstasy and another popular drug called Molly.

“We had some Ecstasy tablets that were 20 to 25 mg of MDMA, right up to 250 mg of MDMA. So you’ve got a 10 times range,” she explains. “If people have two of the lowest strength, they probably would barely feel the effects. If they had two of the highest strength, that could potentially kill them.”

Among hundreds of samples tested at this festival, Measham and her staff also have found ground-up cement, anti-malaria medication and pesticides — all sold as party drugs.

Behind a curtain, a drug counselor sits down with Rio Brown, to explain what his Ecstasy pills are really made of. It turns out he overpaid. His drugs contain traces of MDMA, but also quite a lot of cellulose and chalk — harmless fillers.

Brown decides to go ahead and take his pills. But The Loop says that about a quarter of people who use their service, decide to dump their stash in the end.

The grounds at the Kendal Calling festival are dotted with drug amnesty bins — like municipal mailboxes, for dumping drugs.

Drug counselors here hope those bins and drug-testing tents could become a fixture at music events around the world — perhaps even part of the licensing requirements for festival organizers.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Von Trapp, whose family escaped Nazi Germany, died on Tuesday of natural causes, her brother Johannes von Trapp said, according to the New York Daily News.

“She was a lovely woman who was one of the few truly good people,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “There wasn’t a mean or miserable bone in her body. I think everyone who knew her would agree with that.”

The Associated Press writes:

“Maria von Trapp was the third child and second-oldest daughter of Austrian Naval Capt. Georg von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp. Their seven children were the basis for the singing family in the musical and film.

“The Sound of Music was based loosely on a 1949 book by von Trapp’s second wife, also Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987. It tells the story of an Austrian woman who married a widower with seven children and teaches them music.

“In 1938, the family escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria and performed concert tours throughout Europe and then a three-month tour in America. The family settled in Vermont in the early 1940s and opened a ski lodge in Stowe.

“Von Trapp played accordion and taught Austrian dance with sister Rosmarie at the lodge.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

There’s something a little ethereal about Mo. He’s dark-skinned, but — thanks to some striking contact lenses — blue-eyed, with hair that is both short and long and a big laugh that belies a life filled with tragedy.

Mo came to Norway with his mother at the age of 7 to escape the civil war in Somalia, a conflict that cost most of his family their lives.

“I don’t remember so much about it,” he says. “But I don’t want to go into that sad stuff.

Nor does Mo like to talk about Utøya, where, in 2011, he and hundreds of politically active young people were targets in the shooting rampage of a right-wing extremist named Anders Breivik. Mo escaped, but his best friend — whom he’d met in a refugee camp as a child — was among the 69 people murdered.

What Mo will say about the tragedy is that there’s one song that helped him get through it.

“Heal” was written for Mo before the shooting took place. It’s not that the song holds any secret cure for grief; it’s essentially about having patience. But that’s what worked.

“I really connected with the message behind the song, especially after all the things I went through over the years,” he says. “I took a break and I finally feel ready to move on and to just be me again.”

And for Mo, a lifelong performer, that means getting back on stage. Soon, he’ll compete against 14 other Norwegians for the chance to represent his country at Eurovision, that glittery tribute to song that, for a few days each year, seeks to unite Europe around a musical popularity contest.

Laila Samuelson, who wrote “Heal” for Mo, admits it’s not a typical Eurovision entry.

“I mean, the sound is darker, and also the beat is slower than the usual winning song of the whole thing,” she says.

And although some discourse will inevitably tie the song to Utøya, Samuelsen says that’s become something of a taboo subject in Norway these days.

“It’s not cool to bring up in any political discussion,” she says. “So it really kind of now feels like people are really afraid to talk about it.”

And starting a public discussion about Norway’s national tragedy was never the point. Mo says the song is meant to be much more universal.

“Everyone that lives in this world, they have gone through a thing or two,” Mo says. “And so when they listen to this song it could inspire them to just get right back there and don’t lose their strength, and just never give up.”

When it comes to Eurovision, it’s about the performance as much as the song — and that is likely to be a major point in Mo’s favor.

“My strength, being an artist, is that I’m real. And I just pour my heart out,” he says. He adds, “Mo style,” and that big laugh returns.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.