Your Sewer on Drugs

Sewage is more than just filth. It’s evidence of our worst habits, everything from caffeine to cocaine, all ingested and flushed down the toilet. Now scientists are using wastewater to drug-test entire cities, and the results are sobering

By Eric Hagerman Posted 02.21.2008 at 3:51 pm 11 Comments

Cocaine: No city wants to be known as the cocaine capital of the world, and some critics fear big brother tapping their plumbing. Malcolm Piers/Getty Images

That is, if municipalities will allow it. Back at the sewer, Rieckermann is struggling to lower the 25-pound robotic sampler into its foul-smelling hole. “It’s not that I like this,” he says. But he has no choice. San Diego officials balked at his plan to drug-test their city, so instead of simply receiving samples at the lab from wastewater technicians, who routinely collect them to monitor for environmental pollution, he’s schlepping to the city’s outskirts every day. It’s unclear whether city officials fear the prospect of San Diego’s drug problem coming to light—Heather Lade, the wastewater department’s public-information officer, would only say, “We’re not interested in implementing the program because we have other operational priorities.”

Rieckermann is the first to point out that the methodology of sewer epidemiology needs work. It’s based on assumptions that range from what constitutes an average dose to how often people urinate to how many tourists and commuters might be adding to the soup. And although it’s possible to calculate the total amount of a drug consumed, it’s still difficult to nail down the percentage of users within a population. “If you have five junkies in the catchment, do they compensate for, like, 100 users?” Rieckermann asks. As he has already discovered, there are other sticky questions, both scientific and ethical, about whether these methods can be implemented on a scale large enough to be useful. No city wants to be known as the coke capital of the world, and some critics fear Big Brother tapping their plumbing as well as their phone line. But Rieckermann wouldn’t be mucking around in all this if he didn’t think it held great promise.

SEWERS DON’T LIE

Today’s drug-abuse estimates are based almost entirely on surveys. Interviewers knock on the doors of a random sampling of people and ask if they wouldn’t mind sharing details about their drug habits. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) spends about $40 million a year on its National Survey on Drug Use and Health—the gold standard for epidemiologists—primarily for the expense of sending 600 to 700 interviewers out to canvass for people who will talk. The response rate is surprisingly good, at about 70 to 80 percent, but among the inherent limitations of surveys is the subjectivity of the answers, especially when the topic is illegal activity. “The more sensitive and deviant the behavior, the more likely it is to be underreported,” says Joe Gfroerer, who oversees the survey division at SAMHSA.

Public-health officials also look at emergency-room visits, police seizures and autopsy reports to piece together a more complete picture of drug use, but these numbers are small and don’t necessarily allow for comparisons from one place to the next. For instance, one sheriff’s department may lump heroin and cocaine into the same category, while the next county over separates the two.

Yet this patchwork portrait is the current basis for identifying epidemics and establishing prevention and treatment programs. It also determines how the government parcels out billions of dollars in funding for the war on drugs. “Essentially, all we have is surveys,” says David Murray, a former special assistant to the drug czar and the chief scientist of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the arm of the White House that runs drug-control initiatives. The federal assessment of drug use in the U.S. is based, at best, on incomplete information.

But there’s no question that America has a serious drug habit. SAMHSA’s nationwide survey indicates that 20.4 million Americans aged 12 or older, or 8.3 percent of the population, were illicit-drug users in 2006. An estimated 14.8 million people admitted using marijuana in the month preceding the survey, making it the most popular drug; roughly 2.4 million people say they use cocaine, and 731,000 people admit to methamphetamine use.

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11 Comments

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daveywavey

02/29/08 at 6:11 pm

daveyWavey

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jabailo

03/23/08 at 3:56 pm

I just finished reading "The Ghost Map", a true epidemiology detective story to figure out what was causing cholera outbreaks in London during the mid-1800s. Turns out, it was a common well into which sewage had leaked.

We certainly live in a "global village" with stranger and more persistent disease.

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themarla

03/29/08 at 3:08 am

Oh, please come to Fresno, CA. I can almost guarantee that this entire city is being "whacked out" on chemicals, which leaves them oblivious to what is taking place right under their noses.
Think I'm kidding? I wish I was.

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dontbother

04/18/08 at 1:45 am

This might be an interesting article, but I will never know. Instead of simply publishing the story and taking the advertising revenue, Popular Science has chosen to (as many other sites do) spread the article over several pages to artificially over-inflate their page views and advertisement impressions.

If you made it through this article, you are a stupid victim of an unimaginative advertising scheme.

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Hitari0

05/15/08 at 10:13 pm

Could they simplify it to one page, perhaps?

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kardelen133 (not verified)

05/26/08 at 11:24 am

Hi All
I am a huge supporter of small wind, but I cannot think of many applicable situations for this design. This turbine seems to produce a pretty small amount of power for it's size and logistical concerns. A balloon holding up the other end of a string of turbines?? Good luck passing that through planning and zoning. I also believe that maintenence would be much more frequent with multiple turbines than some simpler designs. It's a cool idea, but before this guy spends much more time and money, he should pick up his guitar again.
saç ekimi saç ekimievden eve nakliyat evden eve nakliyat
thanks.

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worldcommander

05/30/08 at 3:28 pm

dontbother said "if you made it through this article, you are a stupid victim of an unimaginative advertising scheme."

Wow, ease up salty! This is no different than the ads on the pages of almost every published magazine, the commercials between segments of the news, or the billboards on the way to some far off destination. Stupid is being offended or surprised they're there. Stupid is also the advertiser that thinks anyone is paying attention to the ads in the first place. Stupid is hardly anybody that made it to page seven of the article and didn't feel victimized by Popular Science.

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ilahilere

07/23/08 at 4:49 pm

ilahiler
kral oyun
islami sohbet
kraloyun

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ilahilere

07/23/08 at 4:53 pm

This turbine seems to produce a pretty small amount of power for it's size and logistical concerns. A balloon holding up the other end of a string of turbines??gazete okurüya gsmodelleri1 out of 2 people found this comment helpful

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