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RT&DC Moderators: arrall
questions about ecstasydata.com
- Thread starter joneydone
- Start date
earth
Erowid
- Joined
- May 24, 2000
- Messages
- 18
Transform is correct. The price differences are just related to the subsidies that Erowid and our funders offer for different types of testing. In an ideal world, testing would be very cheap for any (or at least most) samples. In an ideal future world, everyone will have the ability to do reliable analysis using their smart devices they already have.. phone, desktop spectrometer, coffee pot, door bell ringer, etc all could figure out what anything is made of for you...
The reasoning for the $40 co-pay for pressed ecstasy tablets is that the results can be useful to humans other than the single person who sent in the tablet. With "I found a capsule in my child's bedroom and I'm suspicious" or worse "I found some stuff in my carpet and am curious what it is", there are zero other people in the world who will benefit from the submitter finding out what that sample contains.
So, all of the samples are given the same treatment ( mostly ). All get logged, field tested, the submitted info entered, and the sample run through GC/MS.
The main differences in time and money spent by us and the lab are related to how difficult the sample is to dissolve into one of the solvents they can inject into the GC and whether the substance is immediately identifiable. When it's not, the lab tech doing the prep-and-run work will try different solvents, try different methods, and then eventually will just give up. So there can be several attempts to analyze any given sample, if it isn't an 'easy' one. Then, once we get the initial results, we decide how to proceed.
In most cases, we just find out the list of substances in the sample, but sometimes there's the unidentifieds or the 'library match only' type. I will send those results off to erowid expert network folks who have identified themselves as analytical chemists and/or Erowid or the lab will order reference standards from Cayman, Sigma, etc to have sent to the lab. The lab then runs the reference standard for the suspected match and then, sometimes, re-runs the original to verify the match.
So, a few samples require 2-5 times the work to identify from other samples, so there are differences in how much effort is put in.
But all are put through field testing and GC/MS.
Coming soon: better photos of the field testing color reactions!
The reasoning for the $40 co-pay for pressed ecstasy tablets is that the results can be useful to humans other than the single person who sent in the tablet. With "I found a capsule in my child's bedroom and I'm suspicious" or worse "I found some stuff in my carpet and am curious what it is", there are zero other people in the world who will benefit from the submitter finding out what that sample contains.
So, all of the samples are given the same treatment ( mostly ). All get logged, field tested, the submitted info entered, and the sample run through GC/MS.
The main differences in time and money spent by us and the lab are related to how difficult the sample is to dissolve into one of the solvents they can inject into the GC and whether the substance is immediately identifiable. When it's not, the lab tech doing the prep-and-run work will try different solvents, try different methods, and then eventually will just give up. So there can be several attempts to analyze any given sample, if it isn't an 'easy' one. Then, once we get the initial results, we decide how to proceed.
In most cases, we just find out the list of substances in the sample, but sometimes there's the unidentifieds or the 'library match only' type. I will send those results off to erowid expert network folks who have identified themselves as analytical chemists and/or Erowid or the lab will order reference standards from Cayman, Sigma, etc to have sent to the lab. The lab then runs the reference standard for the suspected match and then, sometimes, re-runs the original to verify the match.
So, a few samples require 2-5 times the work to identify from other samples, so there are differences in how much effort is put in.
But all are put through field testing and GC/MS.
Coming soon: better photos of the field testing color reactions!