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Testing for Many Designer Drugs At Once
LilaG writes "Drug tests spot banned substances based on their chemical structures, but a new breed of narcotics is designed to evade such tests. These synthetic marijuana drugs, found in 'herbal incense,' are mere chemical tweaks of each other, allowing them to escape detection each time researchers develop a new test for one of the compounds. Now chemists have developed a method that can screen for multiple designer drugs at once, without knowing their structures. The test may help law enforcement crack down on the substances. The researchers used a technique called 'mass defect filtering,' which can detect related compounds all at once. That's because related compounds have almost equal numbers to the right of the decimal point in their molecular masses. The researchers tested their technique on 32 herbal products ... They found that every product contained one or more synthetic cannabinoid; all told, they identified nine different compounds in them — two illegal ones and seven that are not regulated. The original paper appears (behind a paywall) in Analytical Chemistry."
From the article: "The research is timely, too. 'Many drugs of abuse in the Olympics are designer drugs,' he [Gary Siuzdak] says, in the steroid family. Grabenauer plans to extend her method to other designer drug families."
Can't wait to be forced to provide mouth swabs at airports.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
... means it's not illegal. Try explaining that to an employer that can't get past a "positive" test.
address the greater issue of biblical retribution as drug policy i dont see science being able to contribute anything meaningful. Occams razor would suggest the simple solution to whatever the hell OP means by "synthetic marijuana" is just to legalize marijuana itself.
the 'war on drugs' is such an abject failure that that not even our presidents and congress comment upon unless to reinforce the consistently disproven negative myths and stereotypes. Until we apply a modicum of science to determining what vectors cause drug abuse in society, all we're doing is inventing new ways to fill prisons.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Legalize the srelatvely afe, well-known ones, and then no one will be lining up to smoke incense or snort bath salts.
Banning chemicals based on their molecular mass! This sounds like a great way to ban everything. Then the government can lock us all up.
The one drug that lasts for months in your system, already. The one drug that is so prevalent in tests that a number of labs refuse to test for drugs at all, because the only thing they ever detect is marijuana?, because all of the hard drugs dissipate from the system within a few days? The one drug that physicians, economists, and social agentsies around the world say should not be prohibited at all?
Glad to see we're prioritizing.
So, um, what's the false positive rate with this test? For a while people were being convicted of cocaine trafficking because the money in their pockets had traces of cocaine. Eventually it was disclosed that ALL (US) currency has traces of cocaine.
Remain calm! All is well!
He did 80 million in damages to stop a freeway chase.
That is what the government is doing to tax payers with this crap.
End the drug war and give old people back there social security.
I am sick of footing the bill for anything they can think of.
I'm the sort of guy who can't personally empathize with chemical escapism (our time in reality is far too limited as it is for my tastes, and there's far too much to explore) - but really, it just seems complete insanity to expect to help anything by denying it as harshly as we do to others, at least in the US.
The best path would seem to be to defuse the need, and eliminate the allure, rather than spend such a huge percentage of our shared wealth on prisons and enforcement, all while simply breeding worse problems.
There's endless pits of dependency - the harsh 'solutions' of endless punishment only seem to dig the holes into deeper, stranger territory - spreading the drug problem into endless splinters.
As a non-drug-user in general, I'm sick of paying the hidden tax of an inefficient drug policy. I'd rather have open drug use and pity the over-users, rather than have to pay for such an abnormally high portion of our population to remain in jail, contributing greatly to the ruin of our economy.
Ryan Fenton
The real title turned out to be far less exciting.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I'm pretty sure Olympic athletes aren't smoking gas station alterna-weeds. As someone who is a regular user of cannabis and various psychedelics, I can attest that these synthetic compounds are far more destructive and unpredictable than any strain of marijuana or mushroom. Synthetic cannabinoid blends and bath salts are only used by the shadiest of shadesters, at least in the area I live in. I've watched people on them and it's not fun, or funny. Watching someone on them is always a depressing experience, because they either get too fucked up to move or they explode into a violent fury like some meth-ed up trailer trash.
As an advocate for the legalization of marijuana, even I think those JHB-based substances should be banned. There's no telling what goes into them. At least with weed you know what you're getting and what to expect. These designer 'legal highs' are a product of a failed system and only serve to further the notion that all psychotropics are destructive and without purpose.
For those who would disagree, look into the benefits of threshold does psilocybin for the treatment of cluster headaches, as well as the use of MDMA as a treatment for PTSD and alcoholism.
Just like when we had prohibition of alcohol, people were going blind from stills, refusing to regulate pot means they can make poisonous alternatives. I've heard of people getting real sick and permanently maimed off of designer drugs. The worst that can happen with pot is that you try and drive somewhere intoxicated. Pot doesn't even cause lung cancer like cigarettes(You can google many mainstream scientific studies).
Legalization of pot would harm gangs who sell pot in addition to removing pot from being a gateway drug. Since people would no longer go to underground dealers for pot, they would no longer have access to the other underground connections.
God spoke to me
Predator drones overhead and smart drug tests underneath. What a wonderful situation for a freedom loving public. I feel safer already.
or... we could just make pot legal so people wouldn't be smoking these horrifically dangerous "Bath salts" as a replacement. Pots dangers are well known, and relatively benign in comparison to even most over the counter medications. You're far more likely to become dependent on cold medicine and even be killed by it than you are pot. But we continue to treat pot like it's some kind of hardcore child killer.
They are right, Pot is a gateway drug. But only because they made it so. They tell school children its this horrible thing. Bad kids do it. Then the kids find out just how many of their friends smoke it at parties. Holy crap! and then they try it... and it doesn't make them go insane like they've been lead to believe. If they've lied to me about pot, how bad can cocaine be right?
Make it legal to grow. Legal to smoke. Legal to give away for free to someone over the age of 18. Make it illegal to sell. Problem solved and no more bath salts.
As long as mere possession of weed remains a felony charge, people will continue making synthetics that are worse than the real thing, reformulating it every few months to get around the local chemical bans. Nobody has ever overdosed on the real stuff (as stupid/mindless as it might make them), but the synthetic alternatives have had more than a few reports of people blowing their brains out to rid themselves of the pain.
I don't know why the last sentence of the article summary here even mentioned the Olympics, because the issue here is clearly about synthetic cannabinoids and not the steroids that are usually involved in Olympics scandals.
...You would not have to worry about such idiocies. Family business USED to be something you inherited from good parents, now it is little dicked mobfuck wanna-be's who cry if they can't have their own way that we watch on television drama sitcoms.
We figured out how to thwart "designer" marijuana users. Now we can focus on dealing with more serious issues like banning soda.
the 'war on drugs' is such an abject failure
That depends on your definition of "success." Since its inception, there have been the following goals in the war on drugs:
Notice something missing from that list? Public health and safety. That's at the bottom of the priorities list in the war on drugs, because the war on drugs never had anything to do with health or safety.
Palm trees and 8
The DEA is playing wack-a-mole with synthetic cannabinoids and wants to come up with a simple way to outlaw the entire CLASS of drugs that contain anything vaguely resembling a cannabinoid. The problem is that if they use this technique to stomp on this class, it will open up a whole can of worms involving other drugs which are also the subject of synthetic analogs. The problem is these drugs all ping receptors in the brain for naturally occurring chemistry that may or may not be chemically similar. This is just a pop-corn fart away from making a great big unintended mess, that I'm betting Big Pharma might just be able to leverage in its favor. Rather than trying to come up with a magic bullet to prevent people from using something they've been using consistently now for about the last 10,000 years (it was one of the first human cultivated crops), or wasting billions of dollars, man-hours, productive law enforcement resources on this silliness, relax, have a joint, rethink your priorities. There are plenty of bad things out there that you can fail to regulate. Methamphetamines come to mind. Go out have fun, bust bad guys. The whole pot thing was a loser from the start and now that cotton is king again, it shouldn't be afraid of hemp. Really, suck on that skunk, that's a good boy, now leave the buds alone and go play somewhere else... Ta!
...to just get a sample of Keith Richard's blood and run a comparison. If he hasn't done it, you don't want it.
Google results like this one?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-teenage-mind/201102/does-marijuana-cause-cancer
or this?
http://lungcancer.about.com/od/causesoflungcance1/f/marijuana.htm
At best, you can say that there are no definitive studies linking the two, but it appears that most combustibles emit carcinogens when burned.
I'm not saying that's a reason to ban marijuana, but, like with tobacco, users should really make informed choices.
Compared to THC, which is a partial agonist at CB1 receptors, JWH-018 (and many of its analogues) are full agonists. THC has been shown to inhibit GABA receptor neurotransmission in the brain via several pathways. JWH-018 may cause intense anxiety, agitation, and, in rare cases (generally with non-regular JWH users), has been assumed to have been the cause of seizures and convulsions by inhibiting GABA neurotransmission more effectively than THC. Cannabinoid receptor full agonists may present serious dangers to the user when used to excess.
The war on drugs is insane that up until recently this could get sold at convenient stores and was by definition safer than the Schedule I THC. Marijuana is way safer than any of this fake stuff.
Sounds like a pretty good reason to doubt the reliability of the test in question.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Why? Do we not have enough people in prison to make it sufficiently profitable for the new privatized penal industry?
Isn't the meteoric increase in worker productivity over the past decades enough for our economic overlords? Is it just to make sure we all know who's boss?
Did you know that the industry-funded legislative group ALEC is behind many of the new harsher drug laws? I really don't understand it. Why is an industry-funded lobbying group so concerned about marijuana, gay marriage, gun laws and keeping the poor, students and the elderly from voting?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let people smoke, shoot, drink, or otherwise ingest anything they want. Tax drugs, use part of the tax to pay for the societal costs of drug abuse, and go from there.
Intoxication should be considered an aggravating factor in any crime, and should be made a crime in and of itself in certain situations (see driving under the influence).
Making better tests is interesting in an academic way, and possibly useful for certain professions where sobriety is absolutely essential (law enforcement, for one example), but honestly, who gives a fuck for most anything else? If drug use affects your work you'll get fired in time anyway, and if you do harm to another person while high you're screwed anyway.
I'm saying this as someone who works in public health - the damage done by this kind of prohibition VASTLY outweighs the societal benefit of restricting drug use. There's absolutely no question about it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Let people do drugs, and if you have drugs in your system and mess yourself up, you're on your own - no government safety net, no insurance coverage, nothing. Welcome to being homeless, crazy, and dead.
Darwin FTW.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The false positive rate for this test is zero: the tests they describe are the gold standard for confirmation of a molecular formula.
However, especially considering what's being done with these compounds (structural variations on a theme), there is some room for false positives on the structural level. Many different structures can have the same elemental composition: these isomers will have identical mass spectra. Theoretically, they could/should have different fragmentation spectra, but that will be complicated by the structural similarities.
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The 1% don't do drug tests. What more do you need to know?
What a gigantic waste of resources on both sides of the coin. Let the fucking plants grow and regulate the commerce. The current situation is monumental stupidity.
You certainly exhibit the rage, arrogance, lashing out and lack of control. Dehumanising others is a classic symptom of (co)dependence.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Get counseling. It's not just for those you consider inferior beings.
Ugh, I'm so tired of hearing this garbage term brandied about inside and outside of the treatment and testing industries. There is no such thing as "synthetic marijuana" or "synthetic pot" or synthetic "cannabis" The bulk of the drugs being sprayed onto random plant matter are synthetic CANNABINOIDS, and even that term is fairly useless. They are analogs of cannabinoids found in cannabis, seemingly structural analogs from what I have seen. Its almost as bad as referring to a drug as "bath salts". It means almost as little.
A single use of pot every now and then might is not that harmful, but active/heavy use does cause you to become more passive, self-centered and other psychological issues (I'm pretty sure I've seen studies about both but I would be perfectly fine making that claim just based on the anecdotal evidence). Now, you may say "Sure, but active/heavy use of alcohol... or indeed, any brain chemistry altering substance... causes just as bad issues!" and I'm not going to deny that. The big difference however is that with alcohol there is inbuilt protection mechanism.
If you are already somewhat productive member of a society (student, at least part-time work, whatever) it's a lot harder to get into the habit of drinking heavily several nights a week than it is into smoking pot several times a week. There is a significant amount of people affected by alcoholism so I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, I'm saying that if there wasn't hangover, the amount would be a lot larger.
This is actually not intended as arguing against the legalization. I do see potential for reducing organized crime (where I live, soft drugs are a major source of income for groups with far more nefarious activity), gaining some tax dollars/euros and the more philosophical aspect of not denying people the right to choose to do something that's harmful to them. (Though, I live in a nation with good public health care, social security, etc. and in a society like this, a point can be made that people have a duty towards society to not do stupid shit to themselves, from eating too much fastfood to using drugs) I'm just not confident that "The only real problem comes from intoxicated drivers" holds true or that pot is less dangerous than cigarettes/alcohol just because the risk of lung cancer is smaller.
And their definition is inflexible.
If you legalize it the criminals will just go and do something else.
If you make it illegal those that still do it are criminals and if they do something else in place of the newly criminalized thing, that something, by the users own definition must be made illegal.
Its not a healthy mindset and they invariable socialize with the afflicted so never see alternatives and reasoning is discouraged.
just ask them, "are you using ANY designer drug?" This tests for every designer drug.
To quit chasing the shibboleth of "controlling" behavior. Legalize it and tax it, it's the only way to stop the madness.
FUCK law enforcement.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Drug prohibition is about one thing and one thing only:
PROFIT.
Prohibition rakes billions through the business of government each year (and their associates in the "private" sector). That's the entire reason it exists.
I've always believed in the tried and true method of if the person's a lazy, half asleep, do-nothing moron at their job, they get fired. That does sort of leapfrop the whole drug test thing. Oh and if they're unstable, shaky, and can't concentrate as well. That does sort of cover the majority of illegal or pending-illegal drugs.
Meh. It's a paper that exploits the fact that current chemical modifications involve mass shifts in a certain range. They just determined the range by running a mass-spec on the hundred or so things out there (which is trivial considering mass-specs can be done on thousands of sampes in an automated facility).
This 'mass-shift' range can easily change and is not likely to be valid even within months of this paper being out.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
If he hasn't done it, you don't want it.
If it's a new compound, he might not try it until tomorrow, and the early adopter crowd on /. probably doesn't want to wait.
Black pepper, or morphine, or dilaudid, or a codeine metabolite? If this test can't tell, then it is dangerously flawed. Cause I don't think the trace of metabolite from poppy seed muffins is illegal yet. But now that I've said this, black pepper will probably be the name of the next designer opiate.
It's about time that "law enforcement crack down on the substances", cause if there's one thing we've learned in the past 40 years it's that we don't have enough law enforcement cracking down on substances.
Your friend died from the meth, not the weed. I'm sorry for your loss, but conflating the two is incorrect.
Cops are all professionally trained chemist. We must trust in their professional abilities. I am so, so, so confident in their ability to make just and righteous decisions concerning me and my welfare, never trying to use me just to get a notch on their gun for self promotion. The knee they thrust into my back will be done ever so gently.
I do not use drugs nor do I want to be around those who do. But I am concerned about the new test. I drove tour buses and trucks for 25 years and had to take random drug test from time to time. Fortunately, I was never tested just after the continuous job of having to stop college student that I was taking to the ski slopes from smoking weed on the bus. Fortunately I was not tested just after eating a poppy seed roll, that I later was told to never eat because it shows up as heroin on you drug test.
I finally began to make a stern declaration to the ski college students (UCSB - THE party college of America) just before pulling out for the ski resorts:
The first time I smell marijuana on this bus, I am going to pull over, get out, and wait for the bus to completely air out. The second time I smell on this bus, I am going to the nearest police station.
End of problem!
This writeup is a bit ridiculous. Mass defect filtering as a concept has been around for probably 30-40 years and was mostly originally done by hand. What has improved is the software which can take a large dataset of masses acquired during an analysis and filter them; but even those software tools have been out for 4-5 years. I use them all the time for work.
-Mass Spectrometrist at major university
http://news.yahoo.com/baby-soaps-and-shampoos-trigger-positive-marijuana-tests.html
A good toke and I can barely figure out how to walk. It sparks off my imagination - my sense of humour goes ballistic, but I have to keep it separate from any work context.
The voice of ignorance speaks. Don't feel bad, you're just like 90% of most people who had no idea that there are different types of cannabis, with a huge variety of different smells, flavors, and effects.
I used to always hear people say "I don't like weed because it makes me sleepy." Only certain strains induce drowsiness and hunger. Others are upbeat and energetic. Some (esp. Mexican sativas) are crazy, heart racing and trippy as fuck, and those are the strains that usually send newbies to the hospital with panic attacks due to their ignorance.
There is an amazing variety, because this plant produces a number of different cannabinoids (active chemicals) and terpenes (smells, flavors, also active chemicals.) There is something out there for everyone. I'm smoking a blunt of Bubblegum right now, which is a nice mellow chilled out high for a sunny, breezy day like today. It's perfect for playing the piano too.
Okay, one down. Lets all band together and work out how to solve technical challenges of enforcing bad drug laws so we can penalize more innocent citizens!