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Study Shows Cocaine And Other Drugs In Spanish Air
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.
BRB, packing my bags....
But I can often smell our neighbours' cannabinoids. (Barcelona btw)
He's from Barcelona.
So this is how they will finally get people to buy bottled air?
Is that why sourdough tastes so nice in San Francisco?
downtown Vancouver?
I kinda wonder how much of the 'good stuff' is in our air..
Sometimes I get a bit of a buzz just walking down the street after work to the bus stop.
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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
According to the picture, Nicoderm CQ is the new smack.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And, in Prague you would probably smell old beer belches?
So, the higher you go, the higher you get?
Smivs on the intertubes!
Everyone knows Arrowhead Pure Mountain Air is bottled in Atlanta.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Would be arrogant enough to name their operation "Superior Council".
As I recall from my...err, never mind when that was...LSD is a relatively heavy molecule to be floating around. To have even a picogram detectable would imply a lot being manufactured.
WHAT???? No Cough Syrup was detected?!!!!
I call TOTAL bullshit on the detection of lysergic acid*.
No way in hell even a GratefulDead concert would emit a detectable amount! Just more preposterous lies about all drugs are all bad, um-kay!?
*unless its not from microgram qtys of the drug LSD, but from an industrial source of another chemical that fools the detector - most likely just lying, so why not throw in PCP and BZ while they are at it?
Is it still legal to breathe there?
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Sign me up! besides, all of that cocaine in the air has to pass through the scrubbers, and that's where I'll be standing: Right at the front of one of those things! just imagine the buzzzzzzzzzzz
Smoking cures cancer. Smoking also cures stupidity. check darwinawards . com for some stupid stuff
besides, all of that cocaine in the air has to pass through the scrubbers
Awesome! I didn't even think about that when I wrote the original post! Honest!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I could probably set up an air monitoring station in a public bathroom or just outside the door. And then be like "Oh no I have detected large amounts of feces in the air. Someone must have farted nearby whatever will we do? Curse you burrito, curse you!"
Would be arrogant enough to name their operation "Superior Council".
They should have gone with "Higher Body".
Set your phasers on "funky"!
LSD is psychoactive at low doses that are still five orders of magnitude larger than the concentration per cubic meter they reported for cocaine. I'm guessing that whatever concentration they found for LSD was a lot lower than that.
How would LSD get into the air? People don't snort it, and smoking it would destroy it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So, it's basically 15X cocaine, except diluted in air instead of water. Must be a great buzz. The downside: it's so addictive you die within minutes as soon as you stop breathing.
But LSD is psychoactive at such low doses, I wonder if it actually does affect people.
If you RTFA carefully (yeah yeah, I know), they didn't actually find LSD but lysergic acid which is a "precursor for a wide range of ergoline alkaloids that are produced by the ergot fungus and some plants".
I'm not a chemist, but the two possibilities I see is that (a) it is naturally occurring; or (b) someone in the area is running an acid lab (probably more likely). Either way, plain lysergic acid will not have any hallucinogenic/entheogenic effects at those minute concentrations.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Reek like crack cocaine. See the hallway in an apartment is designed as a giant cold air duct. Air comes out of the room into the hallway under the door. Then through the stairways. Thats why there is always the breeze when you open the fire door it is air getting sucked out of the building. If you live in an apartment check out the gap under your door it is required to be there by building and fire codes. Feel the draft?
Nobody expects the spanish intoxication!
I grew up suffering from allergies in Phoenix and I remember reading the various pollen levels in the paper every morning during spring. I could see the different types of pollen levels and decide on whether or not to take my sleep-inducing antihistamines (this was waaay before Claritin and Zyrtec were readily available).
I later read that the local pollen reporting organization was prohibited from reporting the levels of marijuana pollen in the air, even though it often jumped into the top 5. I don't think I'm allergic to bud pollen, but I felt bad for those who were.
So can we _now_ agree there _is_ such a thing as Spanish Fly? Huh?
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
Which absurdum shall we reducto it to?
It's Spanish air, which is to say the air in Spain. Except it's not, it's a couple cities. But it's just the part of those cities that have more of the stuff we're measuring. What's next, a particular apartment building? But really it's Carlos's flat. Mostly in the bedroom. Under the bed. Down by the foot of it. In that box there. No not that one, the other one, the one with the drugs in it. Yeah that's it, that's the air in Spain.
It's that air in those areas of those cities which is the Spanish air, and it has drugs in it. So the air in Europe is laced with drugs. Of course that means earth's atmosphere contains cocaine. In other words it's the solar system, meaning our galaxy, so it's the universe that has drugs in it. It's all the same, right?
So nice of them to be so honest about overgeneralizing. Right there in the headline and summary it says one thing except no, it says something else. Thankfully this takes all the pressure off the author when it comes to pesky details like accuracy and precision and stuff, and lets us get right to the business of it being important and all. That important thingy is what makes it important. Just as long as it's it's important, such as being Spanish air rather than some air samples from the drug areas of a couple large cities, that makes it newsworthy here on dot. And by that I mean slash. Or maybe some of each, it doesn't really matter. Oh, wait, there's more to it than that. It needs to have something more than important stuff to get posted. It should have some words. Doesn't matter which ones, because what it means can change from one sentence to the next in order to make it worth reading.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Junkie hospitalized after attempting to smoke air filter.
I usually inhale more than a cubic meter of air in a day.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We've got to end this insane war on drugs. Legalize them, regulate them and tax them at a level that won't promote a black market.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
A Royale.
An adult inhales ca. 10.000 liters (10 cubic meters) per day, which is still only one order of magnitude more than 1 cubic meter.
It's probably not long before cops with tricorder-like gizmos stop people on the street for being high.
Table-ized A.I.
There is a natural concentration of ~300pp billion of Nitrous Oxide in the atmosphere according to this reference at Encyclopedia of Earth: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nitrous_oxide
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yeah, you consume around 500 mL of air up to 20 times a minute, which comes to 14.4 cubic meters per day. I somehow doubt this is going to make a difference.
Seriously, you can probably find "29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air" of anything in air...
Molecular mass of cocaine = 303.353 g/ mol
29 picograms in 1000 L = .029 picograms in 1 L = 17 464 210 350 amu in 1 L / 303.353 amu = 57,570,587 molecules per liter / 2 = 28,785,293.5 molecules per breath
Grab your breathing masks!!!
[I'm sure my dimensions are off...but I don't think I'm that far off the estimate]
How much of that air do you exhale?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
where he did some back of the envelope calculations... lung capacity, lifetime, time since death, amount of atoms in the air, relative rate of organic material exchange with the atmosphere, dispersal rates, etc...
and he came to the remarkable (or, rather, unremarkable) conclusion that every time you inhale, you inhale something like 200 atoms of socrates. i mean, 200 atoms that made up the living, breathing philosopher from ancient greece. go ahead, inhale: 200 atoms of the man known as socrates just went inside you
i guess you really need to "inhale" to find transcendant trippiness over that fact i suppose ;-)
anyway, look: they are talking picogram quantities here. whatever. you can find picogram quantities of all sorts of outlandish stuff in the air of any city. anthrax, estrogen, plutonium... its all rather sensationalistic and pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Drug smugglers use other airlines too you know!
+1 ROTFL o de week
Oh Man this just gets better and better...
Can't wait for the color coded map. "There is no stopping in the red zone"
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Does it come with a $5 shake?
Don Quixote anyone?
LSD in the presence of light/oxygen rapidly degrades to ISO-LSD which is inactive. Its been called an exquisitely delicate molecule.
You are standing in the Plaza Mayor De Madird.
The smell of cocaine and opiates fills the thick air. Dusk is coming and an unsavory(?) group of people are starting to form around you.
To the North is a vendor selling tourist souvenirs, you think, to the South is a guy hunched over a small folding table. There are exits to the North-East and West.
You will likely be eaten by El Grue de Espana.
What will you do?
mexico = "don't drink the water".
spain = "don't breath the air".
got it. brb
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The rain in Spain will be full of cocaine?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Much more than I inhale, because all of it is hot.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As in Lysergic Acid Diethylamide? As in friggin' LSD? In the AIR??? OK... considering that people traditionally ingest LSD and don't SMOKE it, that's some very interesting information. Sounds like someone's making a giant batch in Madrid/Barcelona!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now put that anlyzer on the Google street view car running all over in cities! Usable or at least interesting information on all cities. Where NOT to live.
so civilised!
Spaniards don't eat dinner till 11PM at the earliest, and don't generally wrap up the day till 2AM. I would imagine cocaine is pretty much a necessity to survive in that culture.
Not to mention the fact that we're talking about almost absurdly tiny quantities of drugs here. When you get down to discussing picograms/m3, you're talking really tiny amounts. I'd be really interested in knowing the size of the error bars on these measurements.
Do the air analysis on the air after that!
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel