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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
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.
Somebody's snorted a few grammars lexdysia it appears...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Possession of any polyethylene chains between 10 and 30 mers is hereby ILLEGAL! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some microscopy to do on my water bottle...
Great Intellect...
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
This does bring up an interesting point. Do laws contain chemical nomenclature and/or diagrams to differentiate extremely similar chemicals? How the hell does anyone in office manage to work that out if so?
This topic demands investigation.
Great Intellect...
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.
As an employer that is realistic and wants good efficiency, you have no business trying to find out if employee x is on drugs unless the intox is blatant and/or dangerous.
Measure your employees by their ability to produce desired output; leave alone their human private lives and personal choices.
'Screening' employees for drugs only makes liars out of the honest people you hire. Drug tests should follow a workplace accident where intox is suspected. Otherwise you should fire them for honest reasons, like low productivity or focus or whatever real issue you observe.
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
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.
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
...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.
As an employer that is realistic, often you *have* to do drug screening. Many industries have external regulatory requirements mandating such testing, and many companies have customers that insist upon it from the service providers they use. I'm no fan of drug testing myself; it's too prone to false positives and the consequences of coming up with a false positive are dire. But all the same, most of the time when drug testing is in place, it's not really up to the company that's having their employees tested.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The best way is to decide if they are worth what you're paying or not, and then decide based on that.
No need to meddle in private lives.
What if the hypothetical drunk you wanted to fire, instead of the mildly slow person, was an alcoholic due to bad parents and genetic propensity? Are you now judging one natural outcome against another while lacking the informed compassion to understand that the drunk never had a choice?
Better yet, avoid being judged as an ignorant or incompassionate employer with one simple foundation: judge the employee as worth/not-worth their pay and leave their life alone.
And it is not even possible all the time, some people don't work individually and some people are not doing work that is exactly the same as other work and therefore easy to estimate how long it should take.
Just because you don't have any good metrics for measuring workers performance, why does that give you the right to make up arbitrary standards unrelated to the job?
If the tests were actual tests to measure intoxication then it would be reasonable, because you're right that you should be able to expect your employees to not be intoxicated on the job. However the tests don't measure that, they test if the user has been exposed to the drugs at any time recently. This doesn't mean they were intoxicated on the job, and for new hires probably doesn't even mean they were intoxicated while working for you.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
As far as you know, he is on meth right now and you're not legally empowered to test every day to catch it.... and you can't tell the difference.
Can you tell the diff? If you can, fire them. No drug test necessary... dangerous use of the forklift. If you can't, welcome to reality.
as an employer I would not differentiate between an employee who is addicted to cocaine or Mephedrone.
What business is that of yours? If your employees are doing their job, why should you be concerned with their choices of recreational drugs?
Palm trees and 8
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."
I love you.
A while ago I was speaking with overheard someone talking about a friend being fired for being high at work. I asked him more about it. Apparently the guy had been working in the same job (welder) for around 15 years. He had consumed cannabis at work over that entire time. It wasn't until a new manager came in and decided to fire him for this. It had nothing to do with his performance, he apparently did his job very well.
What purpose does that standard serve? Do you, irrationally, expect the screen to prove anything?
The screen will turn your honest employee into a liar; you will select for drug users that are good at passing screens.
Reality is reality. Sorry to squash the dream.
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.
I had a very bad parent because of a genetic propensity to severe alcoholism. I am not an alcoholic. I drink but not often. My brother was an alcoholic but stopped drinking because he knew he couldn't do it responsibly so that it was all or nothing. He chose nothing. Some of my father's siblings drank too much but stopped. My grandfather was a raging drunk with a mean disposition. And so on down the line.
Stop making fucking excuses for people. People are not addicted to anything because of genetic predisposition or parenting. They get addicted because of their fucking actions. Fuck I hate... HATE this politically correct BULLSHIT. The drunk always had a choice so shut the fuck up unless you have something useful to say on the subject.
People are responsible for their actions unless they are mentally retarded, and even then many are still bright enough to be responsible. It's why many can live on their own and have jobs etc. The only people who aren't responsible for their own actions are people too mentally deficient to be or those with mental disabilities who need to live on a psyc ward. Now go find a commune and sing fucking Kumbaya with your friends and leave actual thinking to others.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Drunk on power is smiled upon though...
"People are not addicted to anything because of genetic predisposition or parenting", said the person with alcoholic parents in a family of genetically-related alcoholics, while ignoring that alcoholism rates are the exact same with monkeys that have access to alcohol as they are with humans, because it is in fact genetically determined.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You are exactly why I have no faith in our education system. The "all that matters is you try" attitude is disgusting. I assume you learned this attitude via the public schools social promotion program. Pay/employ people based on whether they can do the job. I don't want doctors who try hard. I want doctors who can perform a better job effortlessly. Likewise, I don't want a cashier that tries hard. I want one that can ring me through twice as fast effortlessly.
Fine: But you don't get to go to bars anymore, you're not allowed to go skiing, play football, or anything else that I deem unnecessary to your life which might raise my group insurance plan rates. Also, you have to wear a helmet outside. This is my polite way of saying fuck you and your flawed philosophy.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
blah blah ... self inflicted efficiently[sic] loss is not the same as a nature[sic] one. There is a difference between an employee who come[sic] in drunk once a week and suffers from a 20% decrease in productivity on those days and another one who is just occasionally off their game and has a similar decrease. The first one probably deserves to be fired, while the other one might just not get any raises.
Why? They're equally productive to me as an employer --- and only the drunk actually has the potential to improve.
I'll take your second paragraph as a declaration that the false positive potential is non-zero.
Remain calm! All is well!
Drug laws vary widely of course, but as an example, the US DEA drug schedules both directly specify molecules, including derivatives and precursors in some cases, and also have some entries like "barbiturates not specifically listed." In addition, they include the statement, "This document is a general reference and not a comprehensive list. This list describes the basic or parent chemical and does not describe the salts, isomers and salts of isomers, esters, ethers and derivatives which may also be controlled substances."
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
There's also the Federal Analogue Act that bans any substance that is "substantially similar" to a controlled substance. What this means is totally insane, and completely subjective. The dopamine your body produces endogenously is potentially illegal, since it's substantially similar to mescaline (3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine, and 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine). Your serotonin is equally problematic, since 5-hydroxytryptamine is substantially similar to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is Schedule I, *and also produced endogenously*.
CAPTCHA: hormone
My best friend is a junkie, 30 year, life long love affair with narcotics... starting with codeine in adolescence and escalating eventually to heroin and OxyContin, and finally methadone (illegally). He does this for every test. Yes, it is possible, and it is done. The onset of withdrawal isn't as sudden as you'd imagine, especially when the user KNOWS they can get high immediately following the test... this is a powerful psychological motivator to suppress the physical symptoms, and there are other legal drugs that allow symptom repression as well. Most of what people think they know about junkies is complete bullshit. For instance, heroin doesn't physically hurt you unless you overdose... Wlliam S. Boroughs was in his 80's when he died, used his whole life. Also, junkies, by and large, are kittens and completely non-violent and usually (if financially stable) entirely non-criminal, except to acquire their drugs. They do tend to be, however, like alcoholics, completely untrustworthy, lying to accomplish their goals of getting their next high.
The 1% don't do drug tests. What more do you need to know?
I believe GPs point was that pot was less likely to cause cancer than tobacco, and that if cancer was reason pot was banned, tobacco should be banned too.
Maybe you are as intelligent as a monkey... it sounds like it... but I am more intelligent than one. That is why I can CHOOSE not to be an alcoholic. That is why people can recognize their genetic predisposition and CHOOSE not to be alcoholics. Unless they are intelligent as a monkey.
Just because you have a predisposition doesn't mean you have to live up to it. Stop making fucking excuses for alcoholics and junkies. You know 4 years ago I ruptured a disk and pinched nerves in my back. I was taking up to 4 or 5 prescribed 80mg Oxycontins a day. But even while on it I tried to limit myself to only when needed and occasionally would forget if I took one at the proper time (that is what it does to you)... when I started to get withdrawal symptoms like spiking a fever, the runs, upset stomach... I would realize I didn't take the pill on time, take one, and the symptoms would disappear in 20 minutes. After I had surgery to correct this, it took 4 months to get off of the painkillers. I CHOSE to get off the painkillers. But after nearly a year on Oxycontin make no mistake I was... WAS... physically addicted quite strongly. After the surgery and a few years on, my back still hurts but nowhere near as much. It is as good as it will get at about 70% recovered. I take ibuprofen, aspirin or acetaminophen. Once every couple of months I may need to take a Percocet. But that is it. One. If anyone has your kind of excuse to be an alcoholic junkie it is me. But I am not one. I don't cut any slack for anyone who is one. It is a choice pure and simple. Stop making fucking excuses for people because they choose to be addicted.
If you choose to act as stupid as a monkey, it is your choice. But it is a choice, not an excuse.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Judging from your comment, it wasn't the drugs. You and the guys in your shop were just assholes being irresponsible with other peoples' property. /DBG
Sig not found.
If you guys were wrecking cars it was because you're a bunch of fucking idiots, not because you were high on pot. It's the complete lack of Giving a Fuck that leads to the risky behavior which results in injury and damage, and it happens just as much at a shop with squeaky clean people who have that type of attitude. And judging by a lot of shops I've worked in, seen, or known the workers of, most of you were also drinking and a couple of you were probably spun off your nut on Meth.
You act like it is somehow inherently wrong to be addicted to something or to use non-addictive drugs recreationally. This is because of your experience with a genetically predisposed alcoholic family. If you were more intelligent then that monkey you would have recognized this and worked through it already. Since clearly you are not i would suggest getting help from a psychotherapist.
Do you think you should have been fired from your job while you were taking the oxycotin? Regardless if you have legitimate pain or not the effects of the drug are precisely the same. Did you go to you boss and do the right thing and tell him that due to your drug use you no longer deserve to be paid because you are now taking an evil narcotic which instantly renders you unworthy of your wages? Or were you partaking in some of that politically correct bullshit that just because you are sick you should still be paid money and get to keep your job even though you were impaired both physically and chemically. Lovely when it works for you don't you think.
Being drunk on the job is obviously wrong. Smoking pot, or taking opiates after hours has little to no effect on the performance of you job. For some people it would even help them. If drugs were legal, employers would be handing out cocaine and amphetamines to their workers due to the productivity boost it provides. The only effect it has on life is that it drains money, however this is an artificially created situation. If they were legal they would be dirt cheap and big pharma would give use drugs that are 10x better with less side effects.
There is nothing evil about drugs. What is enormously evil is little people like yourself who feel it is morally justifiable to control the lives of other and trample upon their natural liberties.
Lookit the little flag in the lower right of the shill post. CLick on that and give your reason and quit attention whoring.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I could honestly care less about any damn tests. I've lost jobs over tests. In my religion , marijuana is a sacrament, I practice my religious freedom as guaranteed me constitutionally and I only work for myself or companies that don't test. I could raise a big shit in court and will if I am ever busted. LOL just try to find an employer that is down with not working the Sabbath. That is my main criteria for jobs. Best to work for yourself and have a smoke. I won't be buying health insurance either.
To answer your question , Employers do ask.( every time I've been interviewed) Mostly to save the trouble of testing you. If a company has a government contract, and most do, since the gov. has to spread it's procurement out to any business who can bid, they have to test for drugs, at least randomly. If your company offers health insurance, they test randomly for the ins. co. The government and the insurance companies both will forego your constitutional rights, your religious rights and your human rights, because they can and do.
Fuck em, drop out!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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.
Hate to undo my mod points for this, but I think you're horribly off base. As someone who works in a very dangerous industry where safety is a big deal (container shipping), I can see the point of it. You point out that it selects for drug users who are good at passing screens, the counter to that is that it weeds out people too stupid to either pass screens or not do drugs. Whether or not they get past it by being proactive and not doing drugs, or being proactive and finding a way through the screening process, the fact remains that both examples are proactive and demonstrate higher intelligence than someone who simply doesn't give a damn.
In an industry where one mistake can result in a pancaked human being under a 40,000 lb box and there are frequent traffic issues on container terminals that we try to engineer out, we can't just wait for an incident to happen and say "you shouldn't have been drunk." That's irresponsible, spiteful, a bad way to do business, and a bad way to treat your worker. The role of an HSSE worker is to stop accidents before they happen, and drug screenings are one of the many tools in that box to get irresponsible people out of a dangerous environment.
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.
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!