DanceSafe offers up a Coke Challenge with a twist

The Pepsi Challenge is one of the most famous advertising stunts in history, pitting cola against cola in an ultimate battle of the (taste)buds.

Whilst this Coke Challenge, from Toronto-based creative agency The Garden in partnership with DanceSafe, may bear all of the hallmarks of its beverage cousin, the message is a little more serious that choosing your favourite fizzy pop.

Instead, the friendly tester invites regular joes to tell the differences between two seemingly identical packs of cocaine. The variation? One has been laced with fentanyl and could cause an untimely death. 

Trying to fix the stat that in the US and Canada approximately 80,000 people die of overdoses each year, the rate having doubled in ten years due to fentanyl contaminating the illicit drug supply, DanceSafe are using the campaign to promote the use of test strips which can detect the opioid and its many analogs, a bit like a pregnancy test.

Smart and witty, and, crucially, not preaching that people should avoid drugs, just advising them on how to be safer when partaking, this clever stunt is as entertaining as it is important.