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Terahertz Scanners See Inside Sealed Packages
opticsorg writes "Japanese scientists have demonstrated a system that detects the presence of illicit drugs that are concealed within an envelope. Tests to date have shown that the imaging system can successfully detect and identify a range of substances including ecstasy (MDMA) and methamphetamine. The researchers are now working with companies to develop a mail screening system that could suit use in post offices and airports."
As stupid as the war on drugs is, attempting to gain the upper hand through technology is even stupider.
For instance, thanks to the innumerable advances in creating genetically-engineered plants, we will soon see the day where the characteristics of interest in plants such as cannabis, coca, psilocybin, and opium are capable of being integrated within such ordinary plants as grass, seaweed, ferns, etc. So even if we are able to use technology to prevent drugs from coming into this country from the outside, the obvious solution for organized crime will be to make it so that the drugs can be more easily manufactured from within.
We've already seen this with methamphetimines. By working to reduce the supply and thereby increase the cost of the more traditional drugs, the market responds with a drug like meth, that is easy and cheap to produce domestically. Look at the consequences of the meth epidemic in America. It's a total disaster.
Changing the technology isn't the answer. Changing the policy is. Legalize drugs now.
Who would you rather see selling drugs? Law-abiding citizens in a legalized environment who won't sell to kids? Or criminals in a black-market environment who will?
That's the question nobody on the prohibition side seems to be able to answer. They admit that they will never be able to rid the world of illegal drugs, yet cannot come to grips with this simple question. If our drug policy is based on what is best for the children, then why haven't we legalized already? Why not start letting communities actually control these controlled substances for a change? When do we learn the lesson of alcohol prohibition? When do we recognize that there is no constitutional basis for the continuation of this goddamn policy?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
what about people with prescriptions such as Ritalin or Adderol?
These are essentially medical meth. Does everyone expect patients to carry their prescriptions (or their prescription bottles) with them at all times? No one I know with ADHD carries their full script bottles - just a couple of pills in a case.
1. Picture yourself having ADHD, a script for Ritalin, a couple of pills in a pillcase in your luggage.
2.Picture yourself being pulled from the plane by the Feds for having prescription drugs.
3. ??
4. Profit.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
you didnt RTFA.
the reflected terahertz radiation by the molecular content of the letter is measured against known spectral signatures.
so, yes, it will detect your letters. though right now, it takes 10 minutes per scan, and we all know that is not a workable speed throughput for postal services.
More of my tax dollars spent on projects designed to help my government go on 'fishing expiditions' to see whether or not I need to be jailed. I truly don't understand why the youth of this nation is so untrusting of government. After all, the true purpose of all governments is to vet society for undesirables, yes?
We already put more people in jail than any other country on Earth, proportionately; this apparently isn't enough for some people. When your government starts hunting for reasons to jail you, you know it's gone too far. I once read a very interesting thought on why something like this is done. The author expressed the idea that since governments cannot control totally law-abiding persons (as in moral laws), it must create enough sufficiently complex laws such that no person can possibly go through life without breaking one.
Ask a lawyer how many laws they've broken by lunchtime, if they wanted to get really technical, and I think you'll find the results extremely interesting.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
(Besides: sober or intoxicated, heavy drug users are seldom fun to be around. They're @ssholes or buddy-buddy scheming @ssholes.)
While marijuana is a fairly mild drug and it may be OK to legalize it. That said, just because one drug might be a candidate for legalization does not mean that all are. There are some nasty ones out there and a scanning device that can find them is something I very much welcome.
Who knows; maybe if the supply dries up (ha!), people will vote for drug reform and allow a moderate response instead of the current all-or-nothing one?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Moron. The illegality of most drugs is based on the three R's: (example given is for pot)
* it's nice to know (kind-of) that the current government corruption isn't exactly a recent development
The banning of almost all of them are linked to these. The social/psychological/physical impact is not relevant. Most illegal drugs commonly in use are less harmful than the pollution you breathe in during a stroll down an average city street.
And, why exactly are you against them? Did the alcohol-company-funded groups get to you early as a child? Don't take their drugs!! Take ours!!
Back on topic, this thing is a waste of time, except perhaps in prisons. Drugs do not get distributed through the post. Not do they get around on commercial flights, smuggled in condoms etc. Sure, it happens, but it's tip of the iceberg stuff.
The trade in illegal drugs is the third largest industry in the world. It is liked to organised crime, national security agencies and lot's of other seedy, underhand groups. Do you have any concept about how many "drugs" are consumed every week in the western world? How do you propose to stop this lucrative trade? Impossible. The law of supply and demand dictates it.
The only solution is total legalisation of most drugs. (with a few obvious exceptions). That way, you remove control of the trade away from the people who are the most undesirable to be in that postion.
Not only do you break the link with crime (and the gateway effect), you will also save lifes. I'd estimate that 90% of all drug deaths are directly related to the illegality of the drug, and not the drug itself. By far the biggest killer is heroin. The total lack of quality control means that some batches are many times the strength of others, hence the overdose deaths. The expence and availablity of the drug is also what causes the users to inject that crap into their bodys. If opium was much more available, most people would just smoke it instead of injecting. The same is true for MDMA (ecstacy), The vast majority of deaths are down to misinformation (overheating/dehyration) or the fact that the pill wasn't even ecstacy! The only "evidence" that Ecstacy causes any long term damage was recently thrown out when independant researches found out that it wasn't even ecstacy in the original study!
The drug stuff is a load of lies, like most things that people get told by those in power these days. One other poster suggested that the scientists behind that should try to cure cancer instead. However, the flaw behind that is that there is no money to be made.
Yes, of course, I should have made that clearer.
Alcohol is the only drug you can be addicted to that can kill you when you try to quit.
More people die from alcohol overdose than do from any other recreational drug, even though alcohol manufacturing is legal and regulated and thus produced without adulteration.
Alcohol is more intoxicating than heroin, cocaine or marijuana, and hence, causes more death indirectly through accidents and violence.
And then of course there are the long-term health consequences, which kill more people than any other drug out there save tobacco.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Once one knows how much power the device is putting out, one can tell just how deep it will scan right?
... if this works, then basically they've just made things easier for the drug smugglers... Now they don't have to fuck around with envelopes... They can ship large containers again :!
Just fill a package with a "legal" substance, to a depth just greater than the scanner will read...
Put the illegal substance within...
Cost for foil wrapper -- which COMPLETELY BLOCKS radiation at terahertz wavelengths: $.01
I think the concern is this...
Once you have the ability to determine what the contents are, what's to stop some zelous person from expanding the "hit" list to include whatever moral crucade that person is on now?
We'll only use this xray vision to look through your house to see if you're growing pot. We wouldn't use it to view your private behavior and use the things we found out to blackmail you.
Evidence gathered on you doesn't have to appear in court to get you jailed/imprisoned.
I can gather loose ends about you through illegal searches/surveillance and find the right string to pull. Then I "loose" the initial "illegal" evidence gathered through non-legal means, and pull the right strings the first time but via legal means this time. You'll never know (and never prove) we went on our initial fishing expidition illegally, just that we had this uncanny instinct to know EXACTLY where to probe.
Bang - you're in trouble.
The greater point here, is the more perview of your personal life you give the gvmt, the more they have the opportunity to use it to scrutinize your life and oppress you when it's convienient. No one is completely law abiding - even if you try.
Cheers,
Greg
However, drug prohibition is much, much worse. This about this: For what it costs to imprison a single drug offender, we could be paying a teacher to teach 25-30 kids. Builds schools, not jails. Help people with addiction problems. Prison is very expensive and it only goes after the symptoms of the problem. For many people, they think they are protecting their children. Yet, if their child fell from the straight and narrow, would they want them imprisoned and have their lives ruined with a criminal record, or would they want to get them help? Drug prohibition has terrible social costs. Much more so than the dangerous drugs themselves. http://www.teachersagainstprohibition.org/ http://www.leap.cc http://www.perdl.com
Why isn't marijuana legal? Because the beer companies and drug companies want to keep it that way. Therefore they pad the wallets of Congress. Same with hemp except its the cotton industry which pretty much keeps hemp from being legal.
I agree with you, but also want to add:
1. Racism. Marijuana/Opium were the intoxicants of the poorest of the poor in the early 20th century. This included Americans of African, Asian, and Mexican descent. The use of these plants became to be seen as a low class, non WASP activity. As such, it was frowned upon.
2. Taxation. While it is possible to brew your own supply of ale, and distill your own liqour, its would be difficult for most of us to do this to satisfy all of our needs. And the sale of that product is easily taxable. Yet any drug we can (gosh) grow in our backyard makes it significantly harder to collect on.
-- I am become sig, destroyer of posts.
It takes 30-50 years for cigarettes to kill you. At a pack a day, that's at least 200,000 cigarettes. If a poison takes 200,000 doses to kill you, it is hardly the 'most deadly'. As for 'most addictive', I think watching someone going through heroin withdrawal would convince one that cigarettes are not anywhere near being 'most addictive'.
The way I see it is we're going to get decriminalization which is worse because the only way to get it will still be through the criminal scum bags which currently sell it(rather than the corporate scum bags who could sell it if it were legal). Because of this, drugs will continue to fund crime and do all of the horrible things they do now, except that all of the people who are currently massively anti-drugs(read the people making money off the war on drugs) will be able to say, look, we tried it your way and it didn't work", then we'll be back to the same old garbage.
This is really the point isn't it? If you are going to make more laws to keep pot illegal use the same standards as for other substances. Too many of the current arguments ignore that alcohol is often the same or worse than pot in a lot of ways:
Don't get me wrong... I think driving while under the influence of any mind-altering drug (including alcohol) is a BAD idea. But it shouldn't make pot illegal any more than it does liquor.
People can become addicted to anything if it fills some type of emotional need... or lets them escape from their problems (even by just distracting them from their problems.) So, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people out there emotionally depende nt on pot. But again, you'd have to outlaw beer using that argument. And from what I've seen most people find pot a lot easier to quit than cigarettes.
So, in summary, I think pot is bad for you, and impairs your ability to drive. I think people use it to escape and that (as long as it remains illegal) it encourages illegal activity and violence related to the trade (not use) of pot. I suspect it probably can be addictive to some people. BUT in the end, I suspect that