cocaine

A Case of a Drug-Mule Who Went Undetected by Abdominal X-Ray

Melody Ko MD — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:47:29 +0000

Human drug couriers, colloquially known as “drug mules,” are people who smuggle drugs across a national border by hiding the drugs in the lining of their luggage, in clothes, by strapping the goods onto their bodies, or even by using their bodies as containers. The latter category of drug mules have been the focus of much media attention, and have been the subjects of numerous movies and television shows.

Cocaine - A Natural Scourge

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 12:30:06 +0000

While walking around the exhibit hall at an agricultural conference a few years ago, when we could still travel, I perused the usual displays of farming equipment and industry booths promoting various pesticide and fertilizer formulations. To my surprise, there were also a number of booths selling video surveillance equipment. Why would farmers be interested in these I wondered? A chat with a salesperson quickly brought on a forehead-slapping “aha” moment. Farmers use ammonia as a fertilizer that is stored in large tanks on the property.

Caffeine is considered a hard drug and cannabis a soft one?

Ada McVean B.Sc. — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:45:55 +0000

If you ask almost anyone if they know what a hard drug is, they’ll nod enthusiastically. Ask them to define a hard vs a soft drug however and the nodding might stop.

What natural substance was the first local anesthetic to be introduced into medicine?

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:55:21 +0000

Cocaine. Credit for the discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic is usually attributed to Dr. Carl Koller, an Austrian opthamologist who in 1884 demonstrated that dropping a solution of cocaine into the eyes of frogs and guinea pigs produced a local anesthetic effect. He then went on to experiment on some of his colleagues and on himself, clearly proving that cocaine drops effectively desensitized the eye. While Koller was the first to use cocaine as an anesthetic in eye surgery, he was not the first to note the local anesthetic effect of the compound that occurs naturally in the leaves of the south American coca plant. That honour actually goes to Friedrich Wohler, the German chemist who is regarded as the father of modern organic chemistry. Wohler had garnered scientific fame by making urea, a compound found in human urine, from ingredients that did not come from living sources. With this single experiment he destroyed the notion that substances found in living systems, which at the time were referred to as “organic,” could not be reproduced in the laboratory because they contained some sort of “vital force.”