I learned recently about “Vin Mariani” a wine from the 1860s that was fortified with coca leaves and contained 6mg per liquid ounce of the wine; except for the bottles sold in USA where it was 7.2mg per ounce, because there were other patent medicines that had cocaine in them and the manufacturer added a bit more to be competitive in the market.
The Pope of the time loved the stuff and awarded the company a Vatican medal for it.
> and contained 6mg per liquid ounce of the wine; except for the bottles sold in USA where it was 7.2mg per ounce
Oral bioavailability is lower (around 1/2 to 1/3 if I recall correctly) than nasal use. It also gets spread out over a much longer time because it's absorbed more slowly, which results in lower peak concentrations.
So between the low dose, lower oral bioavailability, slow onset, and lower peak blood concentrations the effects would not have been similar to what we imagine when we think of cocaine users today.
Drugs like this can have very different effects depending on the dose and route of administration. I'm not suggesting that it was a good idea to put this into drinks, but I don't want people getting the wrong idea that anyone drinking this wine in the past was getting the same effects as someone doing a line of cocaine.
In some countries you can get coca leaf tea (mate de coca) which is made from coca leaves and contains small amounts of cocaine, not far from the doses used in this old wine. A lot of tourists are disappointed to discover that it's only mildly stimulating if they feel anything at all, not the intense drug rush associated with taking larger concentrated doses nasally.
While I love the Internet and all sorts of modern life fixtures (in a developed country), I feel a bit like I missed out by not being alive when all the crazy drinks were around.
Unadulterated cocaine is not readily available to 99% of people. Who wants to risk getting some fentanyl or whatever else as a layperson wanting to try it?
This comment seems addressed to the portion of the population that both doesn’t know how to safely buy illegal drugs and also is able to determine which drug sellers are reputable. i can only assume this is an extremely small amount of people
Vinum debet esse naturale de genimine vitis et non corruptum. [1]
IANACL, but I don't see why infusing wine with coca leaves to produce cocaine would be considered any less natural than infusing grape juice with yeast to produce alcohol, and the official Vatican English translation of "corruptum" here is "spoiled", so…maybe?
never knew this was a thing. seems it's still available to buy! sounds like a more respectable version of Buckfast, the tonic wine made in an abbey in Devon that had/has a cult popularity with the youth of parts of Ireland and Scotland
"Buckie" was supposed to be "auntie's pick me up". It is still a minor political issue in Scotland whenever some hack politician wants to make a name for themselves.
Could this not have been simply an instinct to find cleaner waters? I'm surprised they didn't add another control group which injected something unpleasant that could be naturally found in an area, but would be undesirable - ammonia, some sort of acid, or something along those lines.
The study want to prove that cocaine is yet another polluter thar alters the fish behaviour even in the small quantities that can be found in the wild in polluted areas. Not that something is special or different about cocaine pollution.
So the control group in this case are fishes with an implant with no drug at all.
Coffee can do strange things to animals. There's a study where NASA gave various drugs to spiders to see how it affected their webs[0]. Coffee had a stranger effect on the web than marijuana.
Because even in low concentrations, I expect cocaine to have a different effect than Valium. (And in both case I expect a different effect at high concentrations.)
And just like that, smoked Salmon became popular again :)
BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water? In fact, sometimes they can see clear differences between different parts of the city.
Is data like that sold anywhere? I wonder if there’s an analytics market for profiling neighborhoods based on sewage water content now. If my browser history wasn’t already rock bottom, that’s a new low for the ad market
Fun fact: if you sign up for many online casinos or betting sites they will indeed use Google Streetview to lookup your house to estimate how much money they might extract from you.
I feel like looking up official county records which show outstanding mortgage terms and purchase price and permit applications would be a better resource than an image from google street view. You should be able to figure out people's mortgage payments just based on the info on homes.com
Their strategy is more in-depth than that, and they’re more accurately looking for sharps. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer betting for “their guy” isn’t a problem, even if they’re not going to make the book much money. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer smurfing for a sharp can be a huge problem. You can read first hand info from professional bettors, books don’t like to reveal their risk management methodology for obvious reasons.
You would think so, but you have to remember that customer profitability is exponentially distributed. I e., one addict gambling away their and their loved ones life savings is worth more than hundreds or thousands of regular players. Thus, focusing on acquiring and retaining such addicts makes perfect economic sense. So much that individual sign-ups are analyzed down to Facebook stalking and Streetview googling. Much in the same way the addicts hunt for the big win which will make them rich do the casinos hunt for the whales that will fund the whole office for months.
Streetview and a visual model seems excessive when there's plenty of databrokers straight up selling your mortgage info and shopping habits (from CC purchases)
> BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water?
Yep. Not just drugs are monitored this way, but also the spread of infectious diseases. That can lead to sometimes pretty weird findings - for example, polio virus is supposed to be extinct, but every so often it shows up in sewage monitoring of major German cities [1]. The cause most likely are people (tourists and immigrants) from Africa and Asia that got an attenuated virus-based vaccination in their home country shortly before they came here.
Covid is, at least in Bavaria, also part of the regular monitoring schedule [2], Austria monitors for Covid, RSV and influenza [3].
Does more or less cocaine end up in waterways because it is illegal? I would think the amount that ends up in the ocean in relation to failed trafficking may exceed the additional amount from higher usage particularly since not all wastewater is poorly treated and coastal.
I wonder about the root cause. Can it be explained as: (1) Stimulant helps the fish to swim more distance? (2) Inhibition is lowered so the fish is more willing to explore?
Depends on your threshold for credentials and desired pay range. If you've got speed, a stream, and a dream, you can coke up as many fish as you want. It's science as long as you write it down.
Whether it is or is not, is not a function of the cocaine though, but rather idiosyncrasies of the wider ecologies the salmon are in.
If roaming more widely introduces them to more productive food opportunities (or, lower predation) than their closer ecology, then it would be beneficial for them. If it does not, then it wouldn't be. Neither context is determined in the basic finding that cocaine causes them to roam more widely.
Even in the case it were to benefit the salmon, that could still cause secondary problems: something like how nutrient pollution causes some species to run rampant.
Totally. They may wander up bad river, strung out looking for another hit - SNAP! Killed by a bear. My fellow Salmon, please talk to your roe about the dangers of drugs.
The Pope of the time loved the stuff and awarded the company a Vatican medal for it.
Oral bioavailability is lower (around 1/2 to 1/3 if I recall correctly) than nasal use. It also gets spread out over a much longer time because it's absorbed more slowly, which results in lower peak concentrations.
So between the low dose, lower oral bioavailability, slow onset, and lower peak blood concentrations the effects would not have been similar to what we imagine when we think of cocaine users today.
Drugs like this can have very different effects depending on the dose and route of administration. I'm not suggesting that it was a good idea to put this into drinks, but I don't want people getting the wrong idea that anyone drinking this wine in the past was getting the same effects as someone doing a line of cocaine.
In some countries you can get coca leaf tea (mate de coca) which is made from coca leaves and contains small amounts of cocaine, not far from the doses used in this old wine. A lot of tourists are disappointed to discover that it's only mildly stimulating if they feel anything at all, not the intense drug rush associated with taking larger concentrated doses nasally.
Pour yourself a nice glass of wine with some coke on the side?
I can only assume they all died.
Mark Twain wrote about it and apparently really enjoyed the drink. The drink was made with Pisco, pineapple juice and cocaine
IANACL, but I don't see why infusing wine with coca leaves to produce cocaine would be considered any less natural than infusing grape juice with yeast to produce alcohol, and the official Vatican English translation of "corruptum" here is "spoiled", so…maybe?
[1] Codex Iuris Canonici, can. 924 § 3
The study want to prove that cocaine is yet another polluter thar alters the fish behaviour even in the small quantities that can be found in the wild in polluted areas. Not that something is special or different about cocaine pollution.
So the control group in this case are fishes with an implant with no drug at all.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)...
I expect the fish to be more active. A coffee patch would be a nice 4th group as another control.
[1] Chewing the leaves of coke is common in many countries of South America, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acullico
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210327150247/https://arachnidl...
Caffeine is a chemical that plants evolved multiple times independently as an insecticide.
It's almost unbelievable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HipedgM3I
~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fish lack urea cycle, so they produce and excrete significant amounts of ammonia as part of normal metabolism.
BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water? In fact, sometimes they can see clear differences between different parts of the city.
https://wastewater-observatory.jrc.ec.europa.eu/#/content/th...
Also, Wastewater analysis and drugs — a European multi-city study:
https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/pods/waste-water-ana...
Yep. Not just drugs are monitored this way, but also the spread of infectious diseases. That can lead to sometimes pretty weird findings - for example, polio virus is supposed to be extinct, but every so often it shows up in sewage monitoring of major German cities [1]. The cause most likely are people (tourists and immigrants) from Africa and Asia that got an attenuated virus-based vaccination in their home country shortly before they came here.
Covid is, at least in Bavaria, also part of the regular monitoring schedule [2], Austria monitors for Covid, RSV and influenza [3].
[1] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/news/erreger-der-kinderlaehmung-i...
[2] https://bay-voc.lgl.bayern.de/abwassermonitoring
[3] https://abwasser.ages.at/de/
2) From a public policy standpoint, OMG, this more than useless. Cocaine is already illegal everywhere.
Cringe sciencedotorg coverage... TL;DR: Doped Salmon wild. Wild Salmon dopey.
But a lot more fun in pictures; Spiders on Drugs, courtesy NASA.
Quoted Photos: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-spiders-drugs-experime...
Source: Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicity: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19950065352
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/sHzdsFiBbFc
What does it do that keeps you in the restroom frequently?
Salmons get crazy and shine after prolonged walks with Lucy in the sky and some diamonds;
The salmons in question just hanged out with White Stripes.
In her case I believe she was friends with the head of a university lab who recruited her out of her PhD program.
Save the fish.
If roaming more widely introduces them to more productive food opportunities (or, lower predation) than their closer ecology, then it would be beneficial for them. If it does not, then it wouldn't be. Neither context is determined in the basic finding that cocaine causes them to roam more widely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4QSYx4wVQg