| Department - News & Events - GHB Test | |
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Safe and Simple Test for a Common "Date-Rape" Drug
Residing in the news media's towering archives of the dreadful are countless stories of students who drank alcohol laced with gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB. Some died, some lapsed into comas; others passed out or experienced confusion, dizziness, and memory loss. And many women were raped by the sexual predators who slipped the colorless odorless liquid into their drinks. Despite the banning of GHB from the marketplace in 1990 and the passage of the Drug-Induced Rape Prevention and Punishment Act in 1996 because problems were so widespread, GHB is readily available on the street. The putative neuromodulator is an ideal date-rape drug: inexpensive, fast-acting, easy to use, and incapacitation. The conventional test for GHB requires a laboratory, a quarter of a million dollars' worth of equipment, a trained technician, and several hours. (The National Institute on Drug Abuse, in fact, is urgently seeking grant applications for the development of kits to rapidly detect GHB.) Enter biochemists Stanley M. Parsons, David O. Harris, and Dawn T. Bravo. With the generous support of entrepreneur Harold Penn, the campus biochemists have devised a test that is as easy to use as a home pregnancy kit. It is fast, accurate, safe, selective, and simple: One need only insert a tiny dipstick into a drink containing even low concentrations of GHB and the color with change dramatically. "An untrained person can easily perform the test," says Parsons, "and the dipstick could be carried around in a wallet. It would also be useful to people in law-enforcement, hospital settings including emergency rooms, and bars. The potential social value is tremendous." UC has filed a patent for the biotechnology-based test with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. |