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Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / Science and Technology => Topic started by: Cymric on August 05, 2005, 04:43:37 PM
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Check out this link (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7798). Italian researchers have sampled the waste water bassins in the Po river area, Italy, and concluded from the amounts of cocaine and its break-down products in these bassins that the cocaine (ab)use in this area is a staggering factor 80 higher than the government assumes. An interesing side conclusion is that there is 4 kilograms 'snow' flowing through the Po every day. I wonder when the mob or other shady figures build recycling plants to harvest this drug at almost no cost.
I will eat my shoe if other governments will not apply the same type of research to get a proper indication of how much drugs we truly use. And not how much we say we use.
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I read about this the other day, and think that they have actually found a real way of measuring peoples habbits... but then I wondered if there are any of these "break down products" that occur naturally in the environment...?
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bloodline wrote:
I read about this the other day, and think that they have actually found a real way of measuring peoples habbits... but then I wondered if there are any of these "break down products" that occur naturally in the environment...?
Yes, did anyone check whether the river in question has Coca Plants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca) running down either side of it? ;-)
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I'm not really sure about these breakdown products. If I look them both up with Wikipedia, the nitrogen-bridges in cocaine as well as as its metabolite stick out like sore thumbs. I don't think there are many natural sources for those compounds, especially in the thin soup of pee and poop of a sewer system.
The milage may of course vary for other drugs. MDMA (ecstacy) has a rather odd ring in its structure which is not common as well; morphine/heroin/... have a really weird N-bridge spanning across a nearly flat molecule. I therefore suspect that these compounds and metabolites can be easily traced. This of course is not the case for amphetamine (speed) or gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB, 'the date rape drug'), and to a lesser extent THC. These chemicals are 'simpler': amino-acid like, a few longer straight carbon chains, and so forth. Our bodies should have an easier time with those, and thus break them down further.
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@Cymric
I'll supply the Saffrole, and you can brew up a batch of me. ;-)