Читать книгу The World According to Vice - Vice Magazine - Страница 38

HOW PURE ARE STREET DRUGS? | BY ANN HIGGINS

Published May 2005

I bought cocaine, heroin, crack, weed and ecstasy and had them forensically analysed by a chemist at MIT because I thought they would all turn out to be poison. Guess what? Drug dealers don’t cut drugs with cement and ground glass. They barely even cut drugs at all, because they don’t need to. Relax, I’ll explain later.

The samples were analysed by a PhD chemist at MIT (we can’t say his name or he’ll get fired) using acid/base extraction, proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and thin-layer chromatography. Acid-base extraction is the method used to isolate the chemicals. Once they’re isolated, the NMR machine is what you use to analyse and identify stuff. Basically, the kind of NMR done here tells you about the hydrogen atoms in the molecules in the drugs. So it’s like, the spectrum of heroin has 20 lines in it, all at different positions and heights, and you basically look for that particular set of lines. If you see another set of lines, you go, “Oops, there’s something else besides heroin in here.” Finally, thinlayer chromatography is a quick method that tells you how many components there are in a mixture. The MIT guy says it’s “like that experiment you did when you were a kid (if you were a geek) where you put ink on a paper towel and, when the water diffused up the paper towel, all the colours separated.” It tells you how many components are in a mixture but not what they are. That’s what the NMR is for. Still confused? Show this to a smart guy and have him explain it more.