poledriver
Bluelighter
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Hair Test Reveals All the Drugs Actually Hiding in Ecstasy Pills
If you’re at a rave in New York City, a man named Joseph Palamar might ask you for a hair sample. Don’t worry, he’s not part of a drug-induced bad trip; Palamar is a professor of population health at New York University, and he tests people’s hair at parties to find out what’s actually in the drugs they’re taking.
In a paper in the October issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy, Palamar and his colleagues demonstrate that about 50 percent of the people they interviewed at electronic dance music parties in New York City during the summer of 2016 had taken ecstasy pills or powdered molly that contained drugs they didn’t realize were present.
“I expected most molly users to test positive for drugs they didn’t report using,” Palamar tells Inverse. “But what I find alarming is that so many of these people laugh as they give their hair sample and say things like, ‘I don’t use bath salts; I’m not a cannibal.’ Then their hair tests positive for bath salts. These people need to be better educated.”
To conduct this study, Palamar and his colleagues interviewed partygoers about the drugs they’d taken over the past year after collecting bits of their hair. Then, they tested the hair to see whether the facts matched up. Hair samples, Palamar says, are easier to collect than blood or urine samples and are better at helping researchers monitor drug use over a longer period of time.
In half the cases they examined, users didn’t realize that they were taking all sorts of other chemicals in addition to the MDMA that they expected. Most striking was the finding that only three-quarters of the people who said they’d taken MDMA in the past year tested positive for MDMA. What this likely means is that their ecstasy pills contained one or more of a range of drugs that can be found in illicitly manufactured ecstasy pills, and some didn’t contain any MDMA at all.
Among the chemicals Palamar’s team detected were methamphetamine, synthetic cathinones (butylone, ethylone, pentylone, methylone, alpha-PVP), and all sorts of other dissociatives, psychedelics, and stimulants.
Cont -
https://www.inverse.com/article/36477-ecstasy-mdma-hair-test-pmma
If you’re at a rave in New York City, a man named Joseph Palamar might ask you for a hair sample. Don’t worry, he’s not part of a drug-induced bad trip; Palamar is a professor of population health at New York University, and he tests people’s hair at parties to find out what’s actually in the drugs they’re taking.
In a paper in the October issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy, Palamar and his colleagues demonstrate that about 50 percent of the people they interviewed at electronic dance music parties in New York City during the summer of 2016 had taken ecstasy pills or powdered molly that contained drugs they didn’t realize were present.
“I expected most molly users to test positive for drugs they didn’t report using,” Palamar tells Inverse. “But what I find alarming is that so many of these people laugh as they give their hair sample and say things like, ‘I don’t use bath salts; I’m not a cannibal.’ Then their hair tests positive for bath salts. These people need to be better educated.”
To conduct this study, Palamar and his colleagues interviewed partygoers about the drugs they’d taken over the past year after collecting bits of their hair. Then, they tested the hair to see whether the facts matched up. Hair samples, Palamar says, are easier to collect than blood or urine samples and are better at helping researchers monitor drug use over a longer period of time.
In half the cases they examined, users didn’t realize that they were taking all sorts of other chemicals in addition to the MDMA that they expected. Most striking was the finding that only three-quarters of the people who said they’d taken MDMA in the past year tested positive for MDMA. What this likely means is that their ecstasy pills contained one or more of a range of drugs that can be found in illicitly manufactured ecstasy pills, and some didn’t contain any MDMA at all.
Among the chemicals Palamar’s team detected were methamphetamine, synthetic cathinones (butylone, ethylone, pentylone, methylone, alpha-PVP), and all sorts of other dissociatives, psychedelics, and stimulants.
Cont -
https://www.inverse.com/article/36477-ecstasy-mdma-hair-test-pmma
