Your Sewer on Drugs

Down to Business Environmental engineer Jörg Rieckermann, on the outskirts of San Diego, vacuums sewage from a manhole. John B. Carnett

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Jörg Rieckermann snaps on a pair of purple rubber gloves, picks up a crowbar, and levers a manhole cover out of the way. “Here’s my access to the underworld,” Rieckermann, who speaks with a faint German accent, says as he hoists up a barrel-shaped robot suspended above a stream of raw sewage. Rieckermann’s protective gloves and orange jumpsuit are a sharp contrast to the parched brown backdrop of San Diego. But there’s no guarding against the stench. I can almost see the vapor, a rank blend of excrement and vomit that hits me like nuclear-strength smelling salts. If hell has a smell, it has found its way to this suburban portal, sandwiched between train tracks and a highway just outside the city limits.

Rieckermann seems unfazed. Moving with hunched urgency, the athletic 34-year-old pops open the top on the corrugated-plastic robot. The contraption uses a vacuum pump and a long hose to siphon samples from the sewage and then fill a carousel of plastic flasks with a mechanical arm. Apparently the battery has died, because half the flasks are empty. “At least it didn’t malfunction and overflow, like last time,” Rieckermann says, adjusting his rimless eyeglasses. He punches a keypad to recalibrate the draw. The robot beeps and gurgles and then spits up 100 millimeters of brown water. “Now, that’s a nice sample,” he says, holding up a plastic test tube full of sewage to the morning sun. “Liquid, plus particles—toilet paper, feces, sludge, slime.” Not to mention traces of cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin and any number of other illicit substances ingested, digested, and then flushed down the toilet. This spiked refuse is why we’re here.

Rieckermann, a Swiss-trained environmental engineer, is one of a handful of scientists in the world pioneering a controversial new field known as sewer epidemiology, whose goal is to provide the first truly objective estimate of illegal-drug consumption. He’s now visiting San Diego State University on a research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to develop a mathematical model of community drug use based on the amount of illicit by-products that wind up in the sewers.

The approach is, in essence, a community drug test. By analyzing wastewater at treatment plants or at strategic spots throughout sewer systems, scientists can run extraordinarily accurate and anonymous tests on an entire population without ever asking anyone to hand over a cup of urine. (Everyone has to use the toilet, after all.) If, say, Philadelphia implements an ad campaign against methamphetamine, officials could gauge levels of the drug in the wastewater to instantly see if it’s working. Maybe San Francisco is considering building methadone clinics—does the data suggest they’re worth it? And if law enforcement wants to know whether drug busts are reducing consumption in certain neighborhoods, it could get an immediate answer.

Supporters say that wastewater testing provides objective data that links the hard science of chemical analysis and the social science of epidemiology. Conducting a urinalysis of an entire city, they argue, could be far less expensive and time-consuming than surveys, which can take up to a year to process. It would give officials the ability to study drug use in cities and towns in nearly real time.

What’s in a drop of sewage? What’s not? Find out in our photo gallery here. And for the down-and-dirty story behind the story from author Eric Hagerman, check out the first episode of our Cocktail Party Science podcast.