Austria's Mobile Drug Lab Could Test Street-Drug Effects, Too 34
carmendrahl writes "In Austria, people can submit their street drugs to a lab-on-a-bus to ensure they got what they paid for. The government is using the bus to track emergence of new variants of bath salts and other drugs. Now, researchers have developed a test they'd like to add to the bus's offerings: it assesses drug action (full paper) instead of just reporting chemical structure."
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Re:frist psot (Score:4, Interesting)
nah no need, but i understand many people use marquis reagent for a rough appraisal.
im kind interested in why they feel the transporters are sufficient, and for only SERT, DAT and NET.
after all there are many classes of drugs that work on, NMDA receptors, GABA channels, or the Opioid receptors, or Canabinoid recepts (dimers). yeah what about the recently understood fact that many receptors form dimers where two neurotransmitter systems interact via a coupled arrangement of receptors.
what about PDE inhibitors? like caffeine, (also an adenosine antagonist). There are some stimulants that works via this pathway.
there there are the direct agonists, im pretty sure LSD for example is thought to act by direct action on various 5HT receptors rather than on the transporters. still if theyve got a completely automated system that can assay an unknown substance on human cells, (wonder what kind of cell they are), it sounds interesting. are we talking a completely automated patch clamp assay? or would a technician do the pipette positioning.
they have a mass spectrometer on a bus? woah. i would have expected perhaps IR spectroscopy but MS, thats one expensive bus.
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They have government junkies sitting there, trying those drugs and evaluating them.
DanceSafe (Score:5, Informative)
DanceSafe [dancesafe.org] has been doing their form of this for years in the US.
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Yes, Austria has a drug problem: Alcohol (Score:4, Insightful)
As an Austrian, I can confirm that we've got a huge drug problem. But it is not really designer drugs, coke or heroin, it is simply Alcohol. Beer and Wine (as well as the cider-like "Most" in my region) have a long tradition, and are the socially accepted ways of killing yourself slowly with chemicals. Unlike illegal drugs there are strong economic incentives to keep it that way, though. Illegal drugs are really negible problem, as terrible it may be to the individual.
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If they got blue tongues then they're using something that is industry-made, and safe.
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Or they're Giraffes
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No, they'll be fine, they're (ab)using drugs that have been produced by some pharma companies, not some back alley shady pseudo meth lab.
Don't you know? You can only get sick from the clandestine street labs, but never from approved drugs your friendly pharma corporations provide to make your life better.
As a Educational Drug User.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Living in Vienna for 3 years I witnessed a relatively tolerant drug policy. Personally I feel that this approach prevents a lot of conflict, paranoia and alienation that occurs in less tolerant places. That the city has a culture of drug use while maintaining its number 1 position in several rankings for living quality, could be construed as corroborating evidence.
Re:As a Educational Drug User.... (Score:4, Informative)
Shhhh! You're going to cause a lot of people's strokes here! Any city with a drug culture must be a hellhole to live in. Our government has been telling us that for decades, so it has to be true!
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Depends on the drug.
Austria, and Vienna especially, has a rather interesting approach to drugs. Sure, everything's illegal, but there are grades of prosecution. Pot? *shrug* Crack? *sound of door being kicked down*
I could live with that.
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Correlation is not causation. Repeat this until you understand it.
Of course, this is in reply to a pro-drug message, so it will be ignored and probably moderated down, whereas if it were in reply to a less popular idea, would be moderated to +5. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Nothing special (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing special (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think I missed a step in your thought process. It can find compounds but not tell which ones are toxins/impurities?
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Interesting....
For my fellow squares (Score:3)
new variants of bath salts
Note that that should be "bath salts" in quotes. It's a range of drugs that are sold under the guise of bath salts despite having no use as such.
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new variants of bath salts
Note that that should be "bath salts" in quotes. It's a range of drugs that are sold under the guise of bath salts despite having no use as such.
So that's what I've been doing wrong, thanks!
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new variants of bath salts
Note that that should be "bath salts" in quotes. It's a range of drugs that are sold under the guise of bath salts despite having no use as such.
So that's what I've been doing wrong, thanks!
What, using "bath salts" as bath salts? Or using bath salts as "bath salts"?
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With illegal drugs, they have already been government certified (class A, B or C) and they are only available on the black market, where there is no incentive to hide what they really are (assuming they are not cut).
With drugs that have not been formally classified, this is legally a gray area, they are technically sold "not for human consumption" and thus marketed "legally" as "bath salts", "plant feeder", "room odorizer" etc... a form of legal plausible deniability for the manufacturer and the shop.
Due to
We need weed legalised too (Score:2)
If we got weed, we could lesser the use of alcohol, which is massively overused here.
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I guess it's more targeted for Mr. Usually-normal-guy-but-today-partying going to a rave and getting his fix of E, not the average dopehead who's already deep in the shit.