Hi friends! It's Peer Review...*checks calendar*...Wednesday! 😃
We're going to be getting these sorted on a more regular basis now that festival season's winding down and we're all (mostly) home from tent life and got our laundry done. So without further ado, let's crack on!
This week's article is Characterising differences between self-reported and wastewater-identified drug use at two consecutive years of an Australian music festival, by Puljević et al.
The basic takeaway from this article is that what people think they have and what they actually have are not the same things, and basically highlights the need for drug checking. There's a BUNCH of interesting things in this article, but our favourites are:
💛 People that took the survey admitted to taking higher risks with drugs, like taking ground scores without having the substance identified.
💛 Pentylone, which is a metabolite of the cathinone N,N-ethylpentylone, and eutylone were found in the wastewater ONLY. Nobody who took the survey said they had either cathinone. The cathinones in the wastewater could have come from people who didn't take the survey, but that would be a LOT of people...
💛 The researchers had some world-first metabolite detection in wastewater (as opposed to found in drug tests). These included kavain (the metabolite of kava), and psilocin (the metabolite of magic mushrooms)
💛 Speaking of metabolites, researchers found the world's highest concentration of 2-oxo-3-hydroxy LSD (the metabolite of LSD) under rigorous scientific methods
💛 Researchers found cocaethylene in the waste water as well, which is the metabolite your body makes when you do cocaine while drinking alcohol.
Also, this one was recommended to us by someone who follows us on the socials, so if you've got a peer-reviewed article that's relevant to drug harm reduction, drug-related legal issues, or anything in that kind of wheel house, slide us a DM and we'll check it out 😊
Read the article (this one's open source 😘)
https://lnkd.in/gcWVJeDd