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Austria's Mobile Drug Lab Could Test Street-Drug Effects, Too

Posted by timothy on from the gute-hauskiepink-siel-uff-uproofal dept.

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."

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. DanceSafe by Knile · · Score: 5, Informative

    DanceSafe has been doing their form of this for years in the US.

  2. Nothing special by Phobos+Gekko · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!