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Austria's Mobile Drug Lab Could Test Street-Drug Effects, Too
carmendrahl writes "In Austria, people can submit their street drugs to a lab-on-a-bus to ensure they got what they paid for. The government is using the bus to track emergence of new variants of bath salts and other drugs. Now, researchers have developed a test they'd like to add to the bus's offerings: it assesses drug action (full paper) instead of just reporting chemical structure."
DanceSafe has been doing their form of this for years in the US.
As per the abstract, compounds to be identified are done so with a mass spectrometer - nothing special if you're used to working in an organic chemistry lab. The identified molecule is then checked against a database of other known molecules, where if it happens to be new and unidentified, a test is then performed to see how markedly it affects serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. From this, you are able to /roughly/ infer what actions and side-effects it may cause to the user.
That's the gist of it!
Shhhh! You're going to cause a lot of people's strokes here! Any city with a drug culture must be a hellhole to live in. Our government has been telling us that for decades, so it has to be true!
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