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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."
And I'm gonna be hiiiiiiiiighhh, as a kite by then.
This shows a clear need for TSA screenings of all astronauts prior boarding.
It's the only way they could get anywhere high on the budget Congress gave them
Pepsi to retaliate on friday, news at 11.
If you look at the history, cocaine wasn't banned because it was dangerous (back in the day, most housewives were taking it via mystery medicines). It was banned because people were afraid coked up negroes would rape their white women. It still has medical uses and is occasionally prescribed today.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
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
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.
I doubt you'd be singing the same tune if it was 4.2g of Plutonium 239. The unexplained appearance in a restricted area of any illegal substance is a cause for concern.
Only in a trivial sense. Reasonable security measures are at least somewhat threat-specific, and the Kennedy protocols most likely weren't implemented to curtail interplanetary narcotics trafficking. As for plutonium, I'd assume officials are more concerned with the substance leaving the premises than arriving.
To me, that these things are discovered "after the fact" is a good sign that things are working right, given that random "preventative" drugscreening tends to catch at least as many recreational pot smokers as employees with serious, untreated drug/alcohol problems, in spite of the fact that the latter group pose an inarguably greater threat to both safety and security. On the other hand, for many reasons, it is important and useful to know when and if any substance abuse actually played a role in a serious workplace accident, as opposed to whether it could, in theory, do so.
Regardless of one's moral views, it's difficult to argue with the fact that the "war on politically unpopular drugs" leads to serious resource misallocation, given that this viewpoint seems to be supported by virtually every study ever done, not to mention many if not most people working in state and local law enforcement.
Cheers,
Jason
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.
You got that kinda right. People START using it, because they self medicate. They are the most likely to get addicted, because the shit works. I'd say almost all day, to different levels (Full disclosure, I've had my fun with both, and have ADD)
It wasn't cocaine. It was Ketracel White
*snort*. Yep, it's coke.
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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.
Using cocaine to medicate ADHD? Isn't that like using gasoline to fight a house fire?
I'm gonna be hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh as a kite by then...
I'm a rocket man...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I can tell you that as a child I tripped and gashed my forehead open badly. At the hospital, they applied cocaine to the wound to reduce bleeding so that they could stitch the wound up. For the size of the gash, and number of stitches I had, there is no significantly noticeable scarring. I was quite impressed.
If you don't think there are any lingering effects from smoking a joint or two on the weekend when you come to work, you've obviously been smoking the stuff.
Either that or I know how to read and care about the evidence. There have been many, many studies into this, and there is no evidence to suggest that what you say is the case. Would you be upset to find out that the guy performing surgery on you had shared a bottle of wine over dinner with his wife last Saturday? You clearly know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about, other than the lies and FUD you were told in your high school health class. It's time to grow up and think for yourself.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Why not? It's lost in the noise. They don't test for the seriously impairing shit, like religion, insanity, or stupidity. Any chances that the programmer and all the people who checked his work, might have all been high while doing their jobs, is overwhelmed by both the possibility and consequences of other factors. You would have to be using a hundred heart monitors programmed by high programmers, to add up to all the routinely tolerated risks that nobody tests for.
If drug testing were seriously about safety and quality control, they would also be testing for the much more common and severe things first. They don't. Hence, the rationale for it is bullshit.
When NASA says they've stopped hiring people whose bank account audits have found transfers to Scientology, have stopped hiring people who watch Fox News for purposes other than comic entertainment, have stopped hiring people who who smoke a pack of tobacco cigarettes every day, then I'll believe they're serious when they include marijuana testing too, because they'll have shown they've already gone after all the low-hanging fruit.
Current drug testing, though, is like a cop seeing a bunch of cars drive by a school at 100 MPH by with flat tires, as the drivers throw beer cans out the window, and ignoring it all and pulling someone over because they have a suspicious bumper sticker. Don't tell me you're motivated by safety; your criteria for selection shows that you're lying so no one is buying it.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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
You just can't convince certain types of people that not everything their Gym teacher taught them in 8th grade was true. Do you drink coffee ? Caffeine's a drug, and it lingers in your system. Do you operate a motor vehicle ? CO, CO2, NOx, SOx, VOCs. All have lingering effects. Marijuana is not a boogeyman.