Posts matching tags 'cocaine'
2008/1/3
Scientists have developed a vaccine against cocaine, which permanently reconfigures the immune system to attack and destroy cocaine molecules before they can reach the brain:
The developers of the new cocaine vaccine, known as 'TA-CD', are doing essentially the same thing by cleverly combining a deactivated cocaine molecule with a deactivated cholera toxin molecule. The deactivated cholera toxin is enough to trigger the immune system, which finds and adapts to the new invader.
If effective, you can see that some parents might want to vaccinate their non-addicted, perfectly healthy children, so they are 'immune' to cocaine. The difference here, is that once given, the 'immunity' may be permanent. In other words, you would make the decision that your child will never be able to experience the effects of cocaine for the rest of their life.Another option (and one with a whiff of authoritarianism about it, though perhaps not much more than the militarised, prison-filling War On Drugs) would be a compulsory mass vaccination programme, perhaps of all school-aged children. Implemented on a large enough scale, this could be the only way of killing off the cocaine cartels other than legalising the stuff (politically unpalatable) or rendering coca extinct by biological means (an ecological non-starter).
A vaccine against heroin may also be possible, though one wouldn't want to ever be in need of strong painkillers if one has had one of those.
(via Mind Hacks) ¶ [no comments]
2007/10/9
Phrase of the day: "white lobster": cocaine dumped by traffickers and washed up on beaches, bringing fortunes for the villagers and fishermen who find it.
It also sounds like a good song title, in a 1970s-revivalist sort of vein.
2006/11/23
Cheap cocaine is not only killing good music, it could be killing its users; apparently one of the reasons cocaine available on the streets of Britain (the cocaine capital of Europe, undoubtedly due to its status-oriented values compared with the continent) is so cheap is because it's cut with a carcinogenic additive, a banned painkiller which looks like cocaine and is cheap.
I wonder how long until pushers start selling "organic cocaine" to Britain's aspirational classes. (It needn't even be any different than the regular stuff; a 200% markup would give it all the authenticity one could plausibly expect.)
2006/11/21
The invisible hand of the free market shows its ingenuity: as improvements in radar systems make it harder to smuggle cocaine by air, the Narcolombian cartels (which, it must be said, are short neither of resources nor motivation) have been turning to submarines to make sure that their finest produce gets to the boardrooms, clubs and recording studios of the affluent world.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2005/8/13
A quote from a Graun interview with Baxter Dury, who, of course, is the son of cockney punk-funker Ian Dury.
"Drugs have never helped music, they've killed music," he says. "People on acid haven't actually made a great deal of music, they've usually gone mad and dug holes in Wales or whatever. People on heroin choke on their own vomit. Cocaine just makes them turn up the high frequencies and ruins everything. Dad was fiercely outspoken about coke, probably did it sometimes, but didn't agree it had any relation to being creative. He smoked a lot of spliff, though."
2005/8/5
Scientists have found that the River Po in northern Italy is full of cocaine residue; or, more precisely, of benzoylecgonine, a chemical produced only by metabolising cocaine and eliminated in urine. According to this test, people around the Po valley consume one and a half metric tonnes of cocaine a year, three times as much as official estimates suggested.
In other related news: cocaine traces found at EU parliament.
2002/7/3
Business at the Speed of Thought: A look at the amazingly sophisticated high-tech infrastructure used by those exponents of zero-friction transnational capitalism in its purest form, the Colombian cocaine cartels:
the cartel had assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. "They could correlate phone numbers, personalities, locations -- any way you want to cut it," says the former director of a law enforcement agency. "Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans."
They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service.
When the Colombian government launched the unit that Velásquez would later head, it established a toll-free tip line for information about Cali Cartel leaders. The traffickers tapped the line, with deadly consequences. "All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed," a former high-ranking DEA official says.
There are three ways the US could attempt to combat this: (a) by bombing Colombia into a parking lot (which is about as much as would be required to eliminate the cartels), (b) by banning the export of sophisticated communications technology (yeah, like that would work), or (c) by legalising cocaine, immediately cutting off the cartels' revenue and leaving them with a multi-billion-dollar technology bill they have no hope of paying off.