Study Shows Cocaine And Other Drugs In Spanish Air 164
If you live in Madrid or Barcelona, you might not notice the air pollution due to your contact buzz according to a new study. The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations found the air in those cities to be laced with at least five drugs: amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids, lysergic acid and most prominently cocaine. Researchers found cocaine in concentrations between 29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air. The group stresses that the air samples were taken in high drug areas and don't represent most of the air in the cities.
Re:BRB (Score:3, Insightful)
what makes you think this is any different than in a typical town in (insert state/country you live in)?
Less than a billionth of a gram per cubic meter (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about how small that is, and how large a cubic meter is. I'm not impressed. You can find a few molecules of almost anything almost everywhere, if you have sensitive enough equipment.
Primordial soup (Score:5, Insightful)
We just learned earlier today that RNA is found in primordial soup. That's a lot more complex than a cocaine molecule. I bet you could find cocaine in primoridal soup too.
Indeed it's cocaine's simmilarity to other molecules in your blood that makes it work. One suspects therefore that because natural selection chose to use those as the currency for nuerotransmission that it's because they were present to begin with.
(to understand that you have to appreciate the standard model of the evolution of metabolic pathways. the model says, initially organims will just recruit some abundant molecule as their feedstock or for a transmitter. As that molecule starts to deplete the oranisms will evolve some synthetic pathway for producing that molecule from some other abundant sources. and so on till you get to a situation where the original molecule is scarce but is still used by the system.
thus the fact that we have receptors for cocaine-like molecules suggests that maybe cocaine like molecules were naturally abundant in pre-evolutionary times.
Time has come to end the insanity (Score:4, Insightful)