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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 an Austrian, I can confirm that we've got a huge drug problem. But it is not really designer drugs, coke or heroin, it is simply Alcohol. Beer and Wine (as well as the cider-like "Most" in my region) have a long tradition, and are the socially accepted ways of killing yourself slowly with chemicals. Unlike illegal drugs there are strong economic incentives to keep it that way, though. Illegal drugs are really negible problem, as terrible it may be to the individual.
nah no need, but i understand many people use marquis reagent for a rough appraisal.
im kind interested in why they feel the transporters are sufficient, and for only SERT, DAT and NET.
after all there are many classes of drugs that work on, NMDA receptors, GABA channels, or the Opioid receptors, or Canabinoid recepts (dimers). yeah what about the recently understood fact that many receptors form dimers where two neurotransmitter systems interact via a coupled arrangement of receptors.
what about PDE inhibitors? like caffeine, (also an adenosine antagonist). There are some stimulants that works via this pathway.
there there are the direct agonists, im pretty sure LSD for example is thought to act by direct action on various 5HT receptors rather than on the transporters. still if theyve got a completely automated system that can assay an unknown substance on human cells, (wonder what kind of cell they are), it sounds interesting. are we talking a completely automated patch clamp assay? or would a technician do the pipette positioning.
they have a mass spectrometer on a bus? woah. i would have expected perhaps IR spectroscopy but MS, thats one expensive bus.
as well as a Recreational one..... I support a policy of informing users instead of prosecuting them. Legal prosecution and social stigmatization at no way to encourage people to learn about whats out there and make informed decisions.
Living in Vienna for 3 years I witnessed a relatively tolerant drug policy. Personally I feel that this approach prevents a lot of conflict, paranoia and alienation that occurs in less tolerant places. That the city has a culture of drug use while maintaining its number 1 position in several rankings for living quality, could be construed as corroborating evidence.
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!
new variants of bath salts
Note that that should be "bath salts" in quotes. It's a range of drugs that are sold under the guise of bath salts despite having no use as such.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If we got weed, we could lesser the use of alcohol, which is massively overused here.