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Cocaine Found At Kennedy Space Center
An anonymous reader writes "For the second time in the last two years, a stash of cocaine has been found at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. 4.2 grams of the a powdery white substance were discovered on March 7, and field tests by law enforcement officials confirmed that it was indeed cocaine. A spokesperson was unable to provide additional details about where the substance was found, or how many employees and contractors are now being drug tested. An investigation into a similar discovery in January 2010 yields no results after all 200 NASA employees and contractors who had access to the area in which the cocaine was found tested negative for the drug."
NASA's a good place to be flyin high.
But seriously, with their timelines... yeah, coke would help.
-@|
And I'm gonna be hiiiiiiiiighhh, as a kite by then.
Anybody else remember Richard Pryor and the "dollar and fifty cents worth of cocaine"?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Looks like someone was trying to fly to the moon.
And I'm gonna be... HIGH... as a KITE by then.
This shows a clear need for TSA screenings of all astronauts prior boarding.
I was under the impression there are a lot of high-functioning professionals secretly addicted to cocaine because it doesn't adversely affect your performance short-term like, say, alcohol does. True or false?
It's the only way they could get anywhere high on the budget Congress gave them
I bet the space station is the new way to traffic coke into the US!
Fly high my friends...fly high...
The actual amount was probably about 2 pounds. You know how bad NASA is at imperial to metric conversion.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I am utterly shocked that a facility with a large concentration of people exposed to deadline pressures might be found to contain an alertness-enhancing recreational alkaloid stronger than caffeine...
That goes double if the NASA employee population skews a little older: children raised during/after Prozac and Ritalin became mainstream would be somewhat more likely to be expected to use some mixture of Provigil and one of the common prescription amphetamines for a mood and alertness boost, while powder cocaine is a venerable classic.
So now we are in the business of trafficking drugs over not only national borders but interplanetary borders too.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Someone is fscking with them..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the worker that fell the other day?
If you are testing them now and they have any common sense it is going to be long gone from their system. The only drug that has a chance of being found would be pot. The metabolites can stay in the body for a month. Never mind the fact that people try to thwart the test as best they can.
Has anyone said "space dust" yet? There's a joke in that somewhere.
Why is the assumption that the employees are themselves using cocaine? CLEARLY they're taking the coke to space. To sell to aliens. Sheesh.
Why do you think the aliens always do the anal probing?
Someone who has it together enough to work at NASA doesn't have such a terribly bad habit that they are going to test dirty....Not going to happen. Although, if they'd found a bag of Cannabis, it would be a different story. The truth is that the only drug that you can detect more than 72 hours after total seccation of use via urine tests is Cannabis. THC can store in your fat for up to months after chronic use. Now, if they were really serious about busting the perp, they'd administer a hair test! Of course the cape would go dark for lack of employees shortly thereafter, but they'd have fired the idiot who left the stash....
-Oz
“This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
For here
am I sitting in my tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do
Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much (she knows!)
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear....
Thousands of people work at Kenned Space Center - wouldn't it be more surprising if no drugs were ever found there?
Cocaine use is all over the place. Poor, wealthy, young, old - on-the-job use permeates every industry and every culture. The only time it really makes any difference is when someone gets caught with some in their pocket, or someone who lacks self-control fucks up their life with too much of it. There are a lot of ways to fuck up your life, but most of them aren't illegal.
It seems that "The Right Stuff" is actually cocaine.
Any idea what a gram of coke is worth in orbit? If you think running stuff up from Mexico is lucrative, just imagine supplying the ISS.
How long does that stuff keep? Maybe the cartels have a secret deal to piggyback some on shuttles, and stash it in LEO.
Running coke to Mars, just imagine!
And then the Mars Colony Authority will be doing everything they can to get Earth to control the growers, to no avail.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Field tests proved that the substance was indeed cocaine, but there was none left after said field tests.
According to Wikipedia: Employees: 13,500 (2008) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center). The national US average of cocaine us is reported as 0.5% or higher (multiple sources but the low end says around 1.5 million users in the US, assuming they are mostly adults that's at least 0.5%, probably more), so statistically speaking that's about 67.5 (assuming one of then only uses one nostril my numbers work =)cocaine users at the Kennedy Space Center.
Damn smugglers. When cargo boats wouldn't do it, they got jet boats. Then they started using planes. Then submarines. How the hell is the Coast Guard supposed to interdict the shuttles or especially the Russian Soyuz capsules? ;-)
It wasn't cocaine. It was Ketracel White
*snort*. Yep, it's coke.
Help fight spam
Maybe the Space Shuttle brought back a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson's remains - which are mainly cocaine.
But did they go to the cages and test the space chimps/chimp "astronauts" ?
They shouldn't have "tested everyone with access to the area".
Police should have covertly affixed tracking devices in the bag, put it back right where they got it, and waited until someone collected the bag.
In other news, when faced with a strange glass vial of liquid originally thought to be some sort of explosive, NASA officials were relieved to discover it was actually the essence of pure flavor (plain water supersaturated with LSD).
I had an eye exam today, and would test positive for cocaine from the eye dilation drops. I eat poppy seed bagels and thus might test positive for opiates. And so on. People who are subject to those tests must live in constant fear.
Bruce Perens.
So, this is what the brought in on the shuttles last flight. Is that what they are making on thye ISS?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Of course the LAST time this happened everyone tested negative, it's amazing that drugs would magically show up somewhere that no one actually uses drugs.
"An investigation into a similar discovery in January 2010 yields no results after all 200 NASA employees and contractors who had access to the area in which the cocaine was found tested negative for the drug."
I guess they will keep trying to discredit NASA till they figure out some way to actually do it.
I wonder when the last time a politician and his "entourage" got a tour through that area?
So many of the comments about this here strike me as astroturf.
C'mon, this article was posted back in 2005: http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/04/06/2320243/Crack-Found-in-Shuttle-Tank OH, you mean that kind of crack...
Most likely because cocaine is out of your system within approx. 72 hours for light to medium users in urine tests. Unless they were a huge coke head, or they happened to find that coke and test the people within that 72 hours, they wouldn't be testing positive. It would be hard to catch someone with a drug test for a light coke habit, especially if they had just lost 4.2g of blow and the investigation before the drug testing took a couple weeks...unless they were doing hair follicle tests. In which case they'd have to wait a month or so before testing.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I just like the way it smells. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Ashes to ashes funk to funky
We know major tom's a junky
Strung out on heaven's high
Hitting an all time low
My mama said to get things done
You better not mess with major tom
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Why stash it? Why not keep it in your pocket? Car? Home? Vick's Inhaler? In a bag inside a peanut-butter sandwich? Nah..! The ceiling of the lunch room is the best. Ps. Who turns in cocaine? Someone who gets caught with it?
I didn't know Charlie Sheen was an astronaut.
only 2 real scenarios that my feeble mind can comprehend from this.
1 - someone dislikes the NASA program, enters Space center .. places bag at nice sorta easy place to be found .. bam, discredit. .. said astronaut loses nerve, ditches the drug, hops on the shuttle .. and heads into the history books. bam, someone who dislikes NASA program finds coke.
2 - astronaut wants to take some coke to space, as he/she cannot stand sleeping in space (is that a pun?), or having the latest Russian/American/(insert country here, really) creep watch you sleep. at the last second before take off
my 2 cents.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Maybe it was just put there for possible visitors? if you get celebrity from outer space, you want to impress them. With them being bored by even Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters cocaine is the way to go.
HTTP/1.1 400
If anyone can beat a drug test it's the smart folk at NASA
It's a right-wing plot trying to discredit NASA and divert funds to really important stuff like, ya know, empire-building, fighting piracy and fattening the wallets of Halliburton and Big Media cronies.
Charlie Sheen 'was' slated to be a Mission Specialist?
Let me guess, they found it in the transmitter compartment?
http://content6.flixster.com/photo/11/01/47/11014708_gal.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj8W5LhvMtQ
When did NASA hire Cheech & Chong?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhTKuZ5S_oA
Is trying to create Coke M.U.L.E.
4.2 grams is a "Stash"? lol
Scientist: Sir, how would you like to get higher than you've ever been in your life?
Barney: Be an astronaut? Sure!
A guy had an accident, so obviously, obviously he was hopped up on goof-balls. Because accidents don't happen on their own. And because all drug users are all stupid enough to get high 5 minutes before working. Oh, and while I'm at it, let's not forget that, you know, that stuff that gets you high (or used to when you first started taking it, but now you're so hopelessly addicted that you might suffer seizures or a psychopathic episode if you don't wean yourself off of it under a doctor's supervision) called celexa/paxil/prozac/etc, well, that's not a drug, it's medicine.
That being said, ok, so what if the guy was hopped up on goof-balls. If that's the case, let's give him a Darwin award and get on with life. If he wasn't, let's think of what the family must be going through while the media is implying that he was on "drugs" because they found some other guys coke.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Everyone will get tested, and no one will bust, so it must belong to the guy that fell, and yes that must be the reason he fell, he was high....so we are all off the hook, ok, back to work people, we have mission launches to worry about......talk about sick, I hope it is just my imagination running wild, but if this ends up being their cover, I have to say CSI wants their episodes back....
4 grams should be enough to justify a trip to the ISS for the drug enforcement agency...and the dogs! bring the dogs!
in all seriousness though cocaine does not stay in the body that long, so my guess is they would never find this casual user base on how long it typically take to go through all the employees during the drug test
...Major Tom's a junkie.
Cocaine doesn't stay in your system very long. 3-7 days and you'll piss clean on a UA (depends on how regular your habit is.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
How in the hell does someone get coke all over their face while snorting it? Coke is difficult to obtain and expensive. Cokeheads, even rich cokeheads, do not waste coke by getting it on their face.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It always is. Well, that's an exaggeration, but it usually is. For all the supposedly irrational haters out there (and ok, there are some), most of the time when I talk to a racist, I find out that it's really just an excuse to treat anyone else like shit for financial gain. They would stab their own race in the back too, if they only had a socially-acceptable cover excuse for it. "A nigger took my job" is code for "That job paid more than the effort that goes into doing it, and I had a damn good racket going on before competitive pressures made someone think." If fellow white-trash takes their job instead, they are just as furious, but don't have as easy of a way to put it into words as "a nigger took my job."
Assholes. They're not stupid; they're evil.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
How many people work there, several thousands? So, it's not much of a surprise that there are some drug consumers among them. And only such a little amount, if it had been 4.2 kg, I'd understand why this made it into the news, but 4.2 g? That doesn't survive a weekend with buddies and some girls.
Reminds me of this: It was winter, slight snowfall. A co-worker of mine, on a job for a customer (larger firm), was already in the office, when a guy working there came in. He greeted him: "Good morning, Mr. XYZ, so it's snowing?". The guy flinched, and immediately wiped his nose while glancing around fearfully.
Gave us many, many good laughs at after-work-meetings.
Morale: when in public, always look in the mirror after snorting a line.
While entirely possible that there are illicit drug usage at the Kennedy Space Center, it is also entirely possible that it was a false positive given that it was a field tests by law enforcement officials, it does not confirm anything. AFAIK there are a number of substances that produce false positives for most illicit drug field tests (which are merely quick and simple tests). And if you want a work place with possible mundane usage of unusual chemical substances that most street thugs don't have in their kitchen, then KSC is the place to be.
While the initial report is newsworthy, it isn't particularly interesting until the substance is at least confirmed in an analytic laboratory.
Maybe I'm going to have to write a math test module for the Slash code, testing basic statistical knowledge before to post stories and comments.
Doesn't mean someone isn't selling it. "Never get high on your own supply."
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Depends how wasted they are. I do recall seeing a particularly drunk guy at a festival trying to spoon it up his nose - his face was covered in the stuff.
90%-75% to get addicted to Meth/Cocaine?
That doesn't sound very good.
Also there are medical uses for probably most illegal drugs in one form or another, just look at Opium and Heroin. Oxycontin I hear is another as is morphine.
Just because Morphine is used medically doesn't exactly justify Heroin use... Heck if you really want to stretch I hear a common over the counter allergy medicine was used to actually make Meth...
I'm Dr. Rockso, and I work at NASA, K-K-K-K-Yeah!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Lame.
If the cartels have invested in submarines, then what could be next but orbit delivery? Plenty of scifi smugglers in the literature for inspiration! Hey, Han, what's that white powder under your nose?
"Sufficiently complicated financial instruments are indistinguishable from fraud." --bmcraec
It is needed for space performance; don't you think so?
Efoghor Joseph Ezie is a Registered nurse, Christian author and business manager