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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."
Bad scientist, bad, bad scientist! Go cure cancer or something useful!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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?
Well, what about undergarments and a host of other things I could imagine me not wanting government employees to be peeping at?
Can I bum a sig?
... because you know that every drug dealer makes his/her shipments for $0.37 through the United States Postal Service, saving thousands and thousands of dollars a year on trunk repair and gasoline charges ...
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Someone figures out how to reflect these waves to give off false or misleading information... And since the intent seems to be to keep peoples rights intact, you cant just open the package. This will only last as a viable anti drug solution until three MIT stoners get bored.
I have a Cig, but do you have a light?
I love it when they develop new technologies and say that this will be for used drug enforcement first. That makes everyone feel safe. No one likes drugs. But don't you wonder what other spectrum signatures they already have researched? Is it safe on humans? What did you have for lunch this morning?
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!
I wonder how this system would work on detecting a complex biological powder, such as Anthrax spores.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
"At the heart of the Japanese system is a compact and tunable optical parametric oscillator (OPO) that emits terahertz waves. The OPO is made from a nonlinear crystal (MgO:LiNbO3) that is pumped by a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. It emits terahertz radiation that is tunable between 1 and 2.5 THz.
Terahertz waves of several different frequencies are scanned over the envelope and the transmitted radiation is picked up by a pyroelectric bolometer and analyzed by a computer."
Someone seems to have messed up and posted a garbled version of the page. Can someone please post the English version?
~ "When I'm of that age I'm just going to live up a tree."
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?
Marijuana Does Not Cause Reckless Driving
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 08:04:40 -0700
Subject: Marijuana Does Not Cause Reckless Driving
Pubdate: Fri, 26 Sep 2003
Source: DrugSense Weekly
Section: Feature Article
Website: http://www.drugsense.org/current.htm
Author: Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D.
Note: Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and author of "Understanding Marijuana" (Oxford University Press, 2002).
MARIJUANA DOES NOT CAUSE RECKLESS DRIVING
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and certain Wisconsin legislators have launched a new crusade against "drugged driving," with a heavy emphasis on marijuana. This crusade is largely based on scientific misinformation, and it could lead to the enactment of bad laws.
ONDCP has several slick television commercials on the subject. One shows dramatic auto accidents and two crash test dummies passing a joint while a serious voice says, "In a recent study, one in three reckless drivers tested positive for marijuana." Note the careful phrasing. The idea is to make viewers think that marijuana caused the reckless driving, without really saying that it did.
Why would ONDCP be so coy? The answer lies in the actual data regarding marijuana's effects on driving,
I study the effects of drugs and teach classes in the science of illicit substances, so I know this field. The plain fact is that marijuana does not cause reckless driving. Large studies of accidents show that drivers who test positive for marijuana (and ONLY marijuana -- i.e., people who haven't also been drinking or taking other intoxicating drugs) cause fewer crashes than people who haven't had any drugs at all.
That's right, people "high" on marijuana cause fewer crashes than those who are completely sober. The findings seemed impossible to explain. It was a puzzle that made no sense.
A bright and talented researcher in the Netherlands named Robbe recently solved that puzzle. He got experienced marijuana users stoned and had them drive around the streets of Holland. But these guys were no dummies. They drove slower, increased the distance between their cars and the cars in front of them, and never tried to pass other cars. Folks who smoked a placebo (a non-intoxicating substance made to look and smell like marijuana) drove as they usually did. Alcohol, alone or in combination with marijuana, wrecked driving completely.
Robbe's results helped explain the accident studies. People who used marijuana and only marijuana were compensating for the drug's effects by driving more carefully. Nobody should drive high, but we can all take a lesson from these people who did: slow down, leave space between your car and the next, and don't try to pass. Unlike alcohol, which makes people behave recklessly, marijuana users tend to be aware that they are impaired and compensate with some success.
But what about the ONDCP's claim that one in three reckless drivers tested positive for marijuana?
It's not quite a lie, but it's deliberately misleading. The Drug Czar's no dummy. He wants to scare people, and he knows the complete facts won't do it. Instead he throws out scary but incomplete and misleading statistics - -- and hopes people won't question them. Yes, one in three reckless drivers tested positive for marijuana in a urine screen, but we don't know how many of them had alcohol, antihistamines, cocaine, or any number of other drugs in their systems.
Legislators need to ask for the complete facts behind the scare stories before they start passing new laws based on misinformation.
There are cheaper, easier ways to get impaired drivers off the road. Roadside sobriety tests are reliable, inexpensive, and valid indicators of impaired driving. Law-enforcement officers can learn to administer these tests quickly and easily. Unlike expensive blood tests, which can only identify a few drugs, roadside sobriety tests can detect any kind of drug im
Teraview, a UK spinoff of Toshiba, is developing terahertz imaging technology to diagnose cancer, among other medical applications.
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
If I remember my chem 101 correctly, the reason this tech works is because different types of chemical bonds are susceptible to different frequencies of radiation, depending on their strength, which depends on the type of bond, types of atoms involved and their surrounding atomic environment. You shoot a bunch of wavelengths at a molecule and some will be absorbed, and in varying ratios, producing a relatively unique signature. Congratulations, you've just reinvented spectrography.
From dyerlabs.com/chemistry:
Terahertz may be a good candidate from a privacy standpoint, but it's in between the not-so-useful microwave and okay-for-identifying-things infrared. So basically this is just a crippled, privacy-compliant form of IR spectrography, and they've discovered that the amphetamine-based molecules can be identified with it. This doesn't mean that other organics can be properly identified by it.
Frankly, this seems kind of lame.
I can count the number of Japanese people I know who enjoy the occassional reefer on the fingers of one foot.
Some Japanese like the music, the clothes, the attitude but they don't do the blunts.
A few years ago in a place in northern Tokyo (Omiya), a Japanese friend left a bag of white powder - it was actually flour (don't ask) - in a karaoke place with his rucksack by mistake. We paid a left and found 20 riot police waiting for us outside. 4 hours later and a chat with the head honcho and we all had a (rather nervous) joke and went home. Every year there's a westerner visiting from getting stopped and thrown in jail in Japan. The juryless legal system is a weak defence in most cases. Anxious not to be perceived as unjust, the Japanese legal system looks hard at these "drug mule" defence but it rarely washes with the Japanese police.
It doesn't surprise me that the Japanese developed such a device, although I'm a little surprised they bothered, as drugs is not a *pressing* problem in Japan right now.
In fact, the War on Drugs is no longer the demonized "war" anymore. The War on Terrorism is it's replacement.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
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'.