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.
Aurornis 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sekh60 23 hours ago [-]
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.
ryanmcbride 18 hours ago [-]
Boy have I got news for you about the availability of drugs in modern days
bombcar 15 hours ago [-]
The thing is the drugs are known to be drugs. Back then "patent medicine" could be whiskey, could be Dr Pepper, could be cocaine.
AberrantJ 14 hours ago [-]
Or Arsenic - it really cures what ails you - you won't be bothered by whatever it was you were complaining about before.
Pour yourself a nice glass of wine with some coke on the side?
lotsofpulp 18 hours ago [-]
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?
celticninja 16 hours ago [-]
But from reputable sources
sincerely 11 hours ago [-]
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
Scoundreller 11 hours ago [-]
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.
nico 19 hours ago [-]
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
colechristensen 22 hours ago [-]
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.
bombcar 20 hours ago [-]
But can you consecrate the cocaine wine‽
jasomill 18 hours ago [-]
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
j_french 23 hours ago [-]
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
glerk 20 hours ago [-]
Did you actually find a place where you can buy this beverage (the official version)? Asking for a friend of course.
iamacyborg 21 hours ago [-]
Also popular in rave culture
nephihaha 14 hours ago [-]
"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.
somenameforme 1 days ago [-]
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.
anthonj 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.)
rcbdev 22 hours ago [-]
What the fuck is your problem?
kees99 24 hours ago [-]
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.
Zigurd 22 hours ago [-]
There's a big data set for cocaine. It comes from wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) studies.
throwa356262 1 days ago [-]
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.
hmokiguess 1 days ago [-]
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.
lotsofpulp 18 hours ago [-]
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
hmokiguess 22 hours ago [-]
that's wild, do you have a source? curious to know more
seabird 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rationalist 20 hours ago [-]
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.
bjourne 21 hours ago [-]
A friend working in the business told me. I don't think it's a strategy the casinos would publicly disclose.
shmeeed 19 hours ago [-]
Seems quite cumbersome to do this manually when you can get purchasing power assessments at street-level granularity from data brokers.
bjourne 19 hours ago [-]
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.
morkalork 20 hours ago [-]
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)
mschuster91 23 hours ago [-]
> 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) 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.
torvoborvo 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Good news everyone! If you give a fish a stimulant, it swims more!
throwaway2037 22 hours ago [-]
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?
How does one get a job as a "let's give cocaine to this animal and see what happens" scientist?
llbbdd 19 hours ago [-]
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.
jasomill 17 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway888666 14 hours ago [-]
Believe it or not, I am sitting here in botoga in a cafe and drinking coca tea...
zhouzhao 1 days ago [-]
If that is not one good argument to start producing cocaine locally, then I don't know!
Save the fish.
HPsquared 1 days ago [-]
Roaming more widely may not be healthy for the salmon.
parodysbird 1 days ago [-]
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.
HPsquared 20 hours ago [-]
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.
MisterTea 21 hours ago [-]
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.
grebc 1 days ago [-]
They’re in a better mood though.
tirant 22 hours ago [-]
Just before becoming suicidal some hours later.
finghin 1 days ago [-]
I think another study is in order examining how cocaine affects breeding habits.
kvgr 1 days ago [-]
What about the rats and turtles in sewers? They might become more agresive!
lynx97 24 hours ago [-]
There is trash 80s "horror" movie waiting to be made.
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