Drug Testing Entire Cities at Once

Ellis D. Tripp writes "Researchers have developed a technique for determining what illicit drugs people might be consuming in a given area, by testing a sample from the local sewage treatment plant. As little as a teaspoonful of untreated wastewater can reveal drug use patterns in a given community. Obviously, any drugs found can't be tied to any specific user, but how much longer until the drug warriors want to deploy automatic sampling units farther upstream of the sewage treatment plant?" From the article: "one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week."

Comments

Re:meth

[Verteiron]

Actually the steady meth usage is probably from legal prescription drugs like ritalin and adderall. Drug tests can't distinguish them from illegal methamphetamines.

Re:Flushing prescription drugs

[nzAnon]

No, not at all! Return them to a pharmacist for disposal.

For (unsubstantiated) example, your local waste water treatment station is most likely using bacteria to do some of the work, imagine what a large dose of antibiotics will do to that process.

Re:How long before...

[couchslug]

"Insightful"??

Water meters measured INCOMING flow from potable water mains.

If there is sewage flowing through your meter you have a problem:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/05/29/drinking.sew age/index.html

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[drsmithy]

I wonder, if they start doing more and more extensive tests, could they eventually determine the household in which the drugs come from? What's preventing them from testing the sewer water directly out of a house, instead of a waste plant.

Economics.

Re:but.....

[Mr. Roadkill]

what if someone flushes a bag of drugs cuz they know the police are gonna search their house? That'd make it look like 1000 people overdosed at once lol

Although some of most drugs will probably be excreted untransformed, what they're probably looking for in the waste is particular metabolites. So, by looking for both drug metabolites and the actual drug they can probably identify both consumers and flushers.

Another interesting application, if they check further upstream, could be identifying areas containing drug labs. Looking for high concentrations of drugs and various manufacturing by-products in the waste stream could identify neighbourhoods containing labs. I used to be vaguely acquainted with a police forensic chemist who told me that they regularly laughed at some of the amphetamine labs they busted - in some cases, 60%-80% of their yield was going down the drain.

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean The constitution isn't already down the drain?

This isn't a new idea really

[Anti_Climax]

It was done in Italy more than 2 years ago to gauge the number of actual users against survey data.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/28659.php

This Is A Polutant Thang, Not The Drug War

[cmholm]

The research lead, Jennifer Fields, has studied a number of waste water polutants, so scanning for narcotics is just another piece of the puzzle for waste water treatment. Gone (in the US) are the days when you could just disinfect public water with chlorine at the input and shoot it straight into a river at the output.

Now, water planners have to consider a much wider range of crap, from all the acetaminophen, birth control hormones, caffeine, and - yes - dope we're pissing away, as well as the usual collection of bacteria, viruses, organic matter, pez dispensers, and whatnot. It's not only that you don't want that stuff in the water supply, you don't want it collecting in the fish from the lake, Bambi's mom in the woods, or that water you merely boiled when out camping.

So, an increasing number water districts have to collect this information anyway. All that Fields did was analyze a portion of the data more intently. If your jurisdiction plans to stick a sensor into your waste stream at a point immediately before it commingles with that from your neighbors, you'll know about it 'way ahead of time, because it would be a Major project. Frankly, most water districts are so busy trying to keep everything flowing in the right direction, they couldn't be less interested in wasting time checking on your THC-related metabolic byproducts.

(two years) old news

[ceroklis]

http://www.cocaine.org/cocainenews/cocaine-rivers. html

Re:Meth in Riverside

[dreddnott]

Okay, actually, he doesn't test it, he just mails(!) influent samples to the ONDCP (that's what the weird part was). He knows for sure it's to test for cocaine metabolite, not sure about others like methamphetamines. Been going on since March '06 apparently.

Re:question for moderators:

[Knuckles]

...and nobody else in the world does?

Not exactly nobody else. The US is in the good company of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Prison population
In 2000, more than 2.8 million persons were in prison in the ECE region, with approximately 1.3 million in the United States and 700 thousand in the Russian Federation. In general, there were more prisoners in relation to the population size in central and eastern Europe, the CIS countries and North America than in western Europe. The highest rate in 2000 was found in Belarus and Kazakhstan with 550 and 546 prisoners per 100 000 population respectively. The rates were also high in the United States and the Russian Federation with 468 and 460 prisoners respectively (Table 13.7).

Re:but.....

[Some_Llama]

"I don't think your pot plants will like that."

Actually they will :P urine helps green leaf growth in diluted concentrations...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_urine#Gardening

Re:but.....

[TechnicalFool]

Wikipedia is your friend.

Quote:
Coca-Cola did once contain an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, but in 1903 it was removed. After 1904, Coca-Cola started using, instead of fresh leaves, "spent" leaves - the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with cocaine trace levels left over at a molecular level. To this day, Coca-Cola uses as an ingredient a non-narcotic coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey. In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.