Salmon exposed to cocaine and its main byproduct roam more widely | Hacker News Reader

Salmon exposed to cocaine and its main byproduct roam more widely

science.org

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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.

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.

Probably best to have missed out on radium water.

You can still get your Radium Spa treatment in the Czech Republic: https://www.axxoshotels.com/radium-palace-spa

Cocaine is still readily available.

Pour yourself a nice glass of wine with some coke on the side?

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?

But from reputable sources

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

I get concerned when a product’s reviews are all: “received and looks good, will update review when I try it”

I can only assume they all died.

Boy have I got news for you about the availability of drugs in modern days

The thing is the drugs are known to be drugs. Back then "patent medicine" could be whiskey, could be Dr Pepper, could be cocaine.

Or Arsenic - it really cures what ails you - you won't be bothered by whatever it was you were complaining about before.

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

Also popular in rave culture

Did you actually find a place where you can buy this beverage (the official version)? Asking for a friend of course.

it's listed here, though out of stock (and in Ireland) https://www.celticwhiskeyshop.com/Vin-Mariani-50cl

Seems an Irish company started remaking it https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/irish-drinks-firm-...

"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.

And John Pemberton produced a clone of Vin Mariani but when alcohol prohibition was passed in Atlanta he produced a non-acoholic version... coca-cola.

But can you consecrate the cocaine wine‽

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?

[1] Codex Iuris Canonici, can. 924 § 3

This reminded me of Pisco Punch, one of the most popular drinks in San Francisco around the times of the gold rush

Mark Twain wrote about it and apparently really enjoyed the drink. The drink was made with Pisco, pineapple juice and cocaine

> 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.

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 title ie a bit misleading:

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)...

Agree with your point overall, but ammonia in particular is a poor example.

Fish lack urea cycle, so they produce and excrete significant amounts of ammonia as part of normal metabolism.

At very low doses, for example chewing the leaves of coke instead of using the high purified version, it's somewhat like drinking a coffee [1].

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

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.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210327150247/https://arachnidl...

More than anything this seems like a good reminder that spiders aren't human.

And that can be easy to forget in this fast paced world.

what about spiderman?

Obligatory reference to this classic wildlife film from the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa.

It's almost unbelievable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HipedgM3I

Salient point:

Caffeine is a chemical that plants evolved multiple times independently as an insecticide.

There's a big data set for cocaine. It comes from wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) studies.

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

The European Wastewater Surveillance Dashboard:

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...

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.

that's wild, do you have a source? curious to know more

A friend working in the business told me. I don't think it's a strategy the casinos would publicly disclose.

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)

Seems quite cumbersome to do this manually when you can get purchasing power assessments at street-level granularity from data brokers.

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.

I know that people who work for at least one non-profit, use Google Streetview to see how much money they should ask people for.

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.

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

> 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].

[1] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/news/erreger-der-kinderlaehmung-i...

[2] https://bay-voc.lgl.bayern.de/abwassermonitoring

[3] https://abwasser.ages.at/de/

I have a lot of questions after reading this article

1. How would Cocaine end up in wastewater treatment plant in the first place? 2. What is the volume of Cocaine needed, or used to observe this behavior from the fish? 3. If Cocaine pollution has already been happening in the wild, are there any recorded events that support the claim of effects on the habitat

1) Reading the original article as far as I understand, indicates that the dose given the fish is 1000x than is seen in the wild.

2) From a public policy standpoint, OMG, this more than useless. Cocaine is already illegal everywhere.

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.

Based study. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)...

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

> Spiders on Drugs

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/sHzdsFiBbFc

Shine on you crazy salmon

Hahaha, no, wrong substance :)

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.

I mainly couldn't stop myself writing that sequence of words after I'd started :)

Weird, it usually keeps me pretty close to a club toilet.

Maybe I'm walking into a trap here but my experience with cocaine is limited to Scarface and similar movies.

What does it do that keeps you in the restroom frequently?

Because you can't do it in public since it's illegal, but club toilets is where people take it.

And at the very least, it's where you want to be when you start taking it, since it tickles the bowels.

Are you sure you're not snorting laxatives?

But fuck that toilets are awful places just be discreet and no one will usually bother you. That means smell your keys don't rack lines.

If that is not one good argument to start producing cocaine locally, then I don't know!

Save the fish.

Roaming more widely may not be healthy for the salmon.

I think another study is in order examining how cocaine affects breeding habits.

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.

They’re in a better mood though.

Just before becoming suicidal some hours later.

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.

What about the rats and turtles in sewers? They might become more agresive!

There is trash 80s "horror" movie waiting to be made.

Someone stole that idea and went back in time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles

Gotta give them something to improve their perception of their living conditions!

Good news everyone! If you give a fish a stimulant, it swims more!

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?

Video interview with the Salmon in question https://youtu.be/dDj7DuHVV9E

"What the fuck is that?"

How does one get a job as a "let's give cocaine to this animal and see what happens" scientist?

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.

This roughly describes several research projects my late sister-in-law was involved in.

In her case I believe she was friends with the head of a university lab who recruited her out of her PhD program.

Carter Vail was right. Cocaine was invented by salmon - I bet you didn't know that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX0tVk5T6zc

Cocaine bear, cocaine shark, cocaine… salmon?

(lowers mirrored glasses).... mother of god

Cocaine Salmon is the prequel to Cocaine Bear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon#/media/File:Cub_with_tr...

In the southwest there are also meth trout.

Crack Rock Lobster!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4QSYx4wVQg

Believe it or not, I am sitting here in botoga in a cafe and drinking coca tea...

We’re looking at you, Vancouver.

"Cocaine makes me feel like a new salmon. And he wants some too!"

Next up: smackhead whales, dolphins on crack, and manatees hitting the bong.

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