Slashdot Mirror
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."
If they took the huge amounts of money they spend on enforcement and used it to help people who were drawn to hard drugs in the first place...oh yah, we hate fixing things by helping people in the US. Ok, get back to jailing them.
Economics is in the eyes of the beholder, at least in the War on Drugs. The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores, and tax the hell out of it, making it still 1/100th the price of the illegal version for guaranteed quality. Instead, we pump billions into the prison-industrial complex, and poor people subsidize bribes to law enforcement, and people pay the price of overdoses and adulterated product. The expenditures to collect and test sewer water directly downstream of specific houses will be a nice windfall for public works unions, law enforcement, the legal profession, the test lab industry, and manufacturers of chemical analysis equipment. And of course, if it saves just one child from starting a meth habit, it's worth it, right?
how is the truth flamebait? the US incarcerates its problems.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
So if the users wish to keep themselves quietly locked away at their own expense, then they should live with the consequences of the choices they make as adults, after all, it really is only a problem for the rest of society because of the high cost of those drugs and the dangerous criminal element associated with distributing those substances, who, in fact have a significant financial interest in making sure those substances remain illegal.
Whilst I am content to pay taxes for the medical treatment of a drug addicts, or to assist in rehabilitation services for them, having to pay the enormous cost of enforcing the illegality of those substances, or imprisoning the addicts, or the crimes that result because of the high cost of those substances and their addictive nature. As far as I am concerned those idiot wowsers are far more of a problem for me than the drug addicts, as the drug addicts are problem, which rather bluntly, eventually solves itself.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You've bought into the Pusher Bogyman theory. Dealers come in many forms, PUSHERS is a completely made up term. Dealers don't pull strings to get people hooked, ask any pothead. They don't lurk around schools, or offer free drugs to 4th graders. 99% are just people trying to get by and using drug sales as their job. You never see a acidhead with a gun, unless he's planning to blow his own brains out. Same for Ecstasy and Pot Dealers. Crack dealers see it as their way out of poverty, they will do anything to get out even kill. Generally Violent Crime does not spill out into the regular people unless there are crossfires.
People have been robbing and burgling long before drugs and they will be at it long after this phony war is over. Saying that drug addicts are behind it is foolish. The dangerous criminal element are generally not drug addicts, and they are by far more dangerous to other drug dealers then to regular folk.