Category: Chemistry

A safety initiative at Cambridgeshire’s well-known “Secret Garden Party” music and whatever festival saw the local police collaborating with an organisation called The Loop to test festivalgoers illicit drugs and make sure they were staying safe.

The Loop team had a 25 grand FTIR spectrometer to do the testing and if it showed up contaminants they’d advise users to ditch their product and get back to enjoying the music and dancing instead. The Guardian described the initiative as pioneering, which it was in the UK, although similar services have been running in Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands for years (the UK lags way behind on drug policies, what a surprise). Although The Vice reports that only 250 drug samples were tested. There were some nasties that showed up in the spectra a lot of sugar used to cut MDMA, antimalarials that had been sold as cocaine, and some pills that were actually just cement.

The Loop is a team of experienced drug workers collaborating with analytical chemists. If someone offered up a sample of their drugs for testing, the team would hang on to that sample after testing and the users were offered an amnesty so they could hand over the rest without charge or they could opt to keep them but given some advice on drug abuse. It was all about safety and not policing.

Loop team member Henry Fisher had this to say in The Independent:

What has been demonstrated in a small corner of a field this weekend is something more fundamental: treat people who want to use drugs with respect, and they will respond to the advice given to them sensibly. If such enlightened thinking were applied more widely to UK drug policy, the returns in reduced drug deaths and hospitalisations would be vast. That really would be cause for a serious party.

Paradoxically, the festival’s website FAQ stated this: “Please be aware that The Secret Garden Party does not tolerate illegal drug use. Anyone caught using or distributing illegal drugs will be severely reprimanded. Drug detection dogs will be working on the gates in order to stop any illegal drugs entering the site. There will be a police presence inside the event, please respect them. Drugs are ILLEGAL.”

I asked Loop team member Jens Thomas for the skinny on the FTIR for my SpectroscopyNOW column:

“The FTIR is fantastic as far as it goes, as it allows us to identify a sample in under a couple of minutes and feed that back to the drugs workers so that they can advise the client on how to proceed safely if they are resolved to take the drug,” Thomas told me. “For probably 80-90% of what we see, the FTIR is enough; we can identify the primary component and then run a simple subtraction analysis to see if the sample is substantially adulterated with anything else.”

Adding, “However, as we work with more samples, we are seeing where the limitations of the technique lie. Some of the binders and fillers in ecstasy pills can mask the signal from MDMA, so we need to run a solvent extraction to extract the active component, and then analyse the extract with the FTIR; which obviously adds considerably to the time and effort required to get a result. Also some drugs are so potent (e.g. LSD) that they are present in such trace quantities that we cannot see them with the FTIR. In addition, FTIR is only (currently) a qualitative technique, so we need to run additional tests in order to quantify the MDMA in a pill, as this is crucial information for someone considering taking it. Some of the pills are so strong (>200mg) that taking two (double-dropping – something that used to be very common a few years ago when pills were weaker) could be pushing into lethal dose territory.

We are therefore looking to augment the FTIR with additional techniques, firstly to extend the range of what we can test, but also to provide additional confidence in the results we’re getting from the FTIR. Mass spec is something we’re interested in as it seems to have the sensitivity required and the latest machines are robust and portable enough that we could consider using them in the sub-optimal conditions we usually work in – i.e. knee deep in mud at festivals!”

Forming hydrogen – The gas can be released efficiently from liquid formic acid for use in fuel-cell powered vehicles. Proof of principle utilised nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to follow the catalytic chemistry involved in the process. More…

X-rayed butterfly - Researchers have used X-ray coherent diffractive imaging to take a close look at how the photonic crystals on the surface of a butterfly’s wing generated the brilliant iridescent colours we perceive. More…

Now the twain shall meet – Future quantum computational and other devices might rely on the mixing of photons and molecules. Now, researchers in the UK have demonstrated how a single molecule trapped in a tiny optical cavity can emit a photon, but that particle of light re-enters the molecule before it leaves the cavity, mixing molecule and photon completely. More…

Last month I reported on research into “green” coffee for SpectroscopyNOW. From a quick glance at the reader statistics it looks like it was one of my most popular articles in recent months. What is it about coffee? We’re fascinated…

Anyway, the story discussed how unroasted, green, coffee beans have become a popular alternative to regular coffee because of supposed health benefits, but there was little solid evidence of mineral availability or antioxidants from a green coffee drink that might support the claims.

Now, a team at Wroclaw University of Technology, in Poland, have used a sophisticated analytical technique* to measure how much calcium, copper, iron, magnesium and manganese ions are released into an infusion depending on whether or not the drink is made “in the cup”, using a drip filter or the Turkish coffee method. They found that calcium and magnesium are released (and so can be ingested) better than the other mineral ions but only if drip filtering or Turkish brewing was used rather than making it in the cup**. Tests on antioxidant activity also correlated with those brews from which the most calcium was leached.

*High-resolution-continuum source flame atomic absorption spectrometry
**My photo of a frothy fern in my coffee, not green coffee, unfortunately, roasted

Brain scans reveal that different parts of the brain light up when jazz musicians are improvising and “trading fours”, when they’re engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation. The specific parts of the brain that are activated are those associated with the interpretation of the structure of phrases and sentences, the syntactics. Conversely, the musical “conversation” leads to reduced activity in brain areas linked to meaning, the semantics. I report more details in my latest column on the MRI channel at SpectroscopyNOW.com, but I also spoke to Joe Thompson, Musical Director of London’s “The Club at the Ivy” to get a jazz musician’s perspective on the research.

“Exchanging fours with a great jazz musician offers a freedom of expression far greater than the spoken word can ever hope to obtain,” he told me. “At best, it is a dialogue of emotions, a communion of feelings. Youre contradicting, testing each other, challenging and daring each other. You’re sharing experiences, enjoying a joke and a laugh. It’s a game of tennis, a fight, a dual. It is meticulously calculated one moment and blind risk the next. It’s a dance, a shared tribute. One minute you are Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal, the next you are Torville and Dean, Morecambe and Wise, whoever you want to be. A random blend of the highly sophisticated and the base, it can be highly cerebral as well as utterly naive. You share, you compliment, you clash. It’s a two-minute marriage.”

Thompson, who has collaborated with Elvis Costello and Diana Krall among others, suggests that it can feel primeval. “The most exciting, provoking, fulfilling exchange of fours I had (on piano) was with a guy on a djembe (African drum). He not only made me do things I didn’t know I could do, I played things I didn’t know I wanted to play,” he confessed.

There is a suggestion that a musical exchange somehow bypasses the brain, at least that is hw it feels to Thompson. “You are spontaneously playing what you feel at the precise moment you feel it,” he adds. “You breathe his music in, and your music out. How you play and what you play depends on many things. The best improvising is of the moment and in the moment. Compared to all of this, a spoken dialogue is a walk in the park.”

Of course, he points out that when we communicate with each other we are doing a lot more than listening to, processing and returning the spoken word. “In close-up, face to face dialogue, all of the senses are used, as they are when playing music with someone,” he says. “Is the brain working harder in the jazz dialogue than in a situation where a terrified bloke is chatting up the love of his life, knowing he only has one shot at it? Who knows? But, I don’t think you need an MRI to tell you that the brain is working in similar ways in each situation.”

From the scientific perspective, we do need that MRI scan to provide the physical evidence for what is happening in the brain and you can read the details on SpectroscopyNOW.