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

Worse still, those figures almost certainly underestimate the problem. In 2005, Italian environmental chemists Ettore Zuccato and Roberto Fanelli of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, pioneers in the field of sewer epidemiology, drug-tested Italy’s Po River and several wastewater-treatment plants for benzoylecgonine, the main by-product of cocaine. In the end, they estimated that the equivalent of four kilograms of the drug and its by-product flow through the Po every day. That works out to be about 40,000 doses, each about 100 milligrams, roughly equivalent to a pinch of sugar. If consumption were evenly distributed among the river basin’s 1.4 million people aged 15 to 35 (the typical user), about 2.7 percent of them use cocaine. This figure is more than double the official estimates from drug surveys of Italy in 2001, the most recent available. But the researchers met resistance when they shared their results with government drug agencies. “Nobody wanted to believe it,” Fanelli says.

Perhaps even more compelling is what they found in Milan. After several months of drug-testing the city’s sewage, they discovered that although cocaine use spikes during the weekend, as expected, levels are still significant on the weekdays, which suggests that people use the drug not only recreationally but also habitually. Since then, Zuccato and Fanelli have widened the net to track other drugs. Their results estimate that the presence of amphetamines in Milan has doubled or tripled in the past several years, while heroin use—contrary to survey results—has dropped considerably.

Purple Haze: Chemist Jennifer Field drug-tests sewage near Portland, Oregon. James A. Folts

The researchers were invited to Lisbon, Portugal, last spring by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction to flesh out their methodology with five other scientists. Rieckermann attended, along with local experts in metabolism, epidemiology and disease-mapping. Collectively, they produced a white paper on the subject, which the EMCDDA intends to publish this spring. The hope is that the agency will follow up with funding for a formal monitoring system in a number of major European cities. “We need to have more data,” Fanelli says. “We’d like to have a full year covered, day by day.”

THE OREGON TRAIL

It was Christian Daughton, chief of environmental chemistry at the Environmental Protection Agency, who laid the groundwork for sewer epidemiology. In 1999 Daughton published a landmark paper documenting what happens to personal-care products and common prescription drugs such as birth-control pills when we pass them through urine or just flush them whole. All the potions and lotions we use, he concluded, end up in our rivers and drinking water. His interest was in the resulting pollution, but the finding held larger ramifications: The life of a drug persists long after we ingest it.

In 2001 Daughton proposed the novel idea of testing for illicit drugs in wastewater. After all, he said, “chemicals are chemicals,” and whether they come from bug spray or dime bags, they affect the environment. In 2004 the EPA followed up on Daughton’s proposal and tested effluent from three wastewater-treatment plants. The study, published in an environmental journal, revealed significant levels of methamphetamine and Ecstasy in the samples. But the EPA was less concerned about where the drugs came from than where they were going, namely, into marine life and drinking water.

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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.
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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
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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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