News Some Good Shit
posted by on December 13 at 13:37 PM
There is an article in yesterday’s New York Times about a method being used in Europe to better estimate regional drug use: drug testing entire cities.
The technique was used on samples from two wastewater treatment plants, in Milan and Lugano, Switzerland. The researchers, who describe their approach in the journal Analytical Chemistry, said they were able to detect the drugs (and metabolites) at as low as 10 nanograms per liter. It made little difference whether the wastewater was treated.
Traditional methods for generating estimates are considered faulty because the data is gathered through conversations that boil down to this:
Ring, ring
Hello?
Hello, I’m calling on behalf of the federal government.
M’kay…
Yeah, are you using illicit drugs?
Why, gosh, no. I’m not using illicit drugs.
Not surprisingly, lots of drug users claim squeaky clean living when questioned by the government (or any stranger calling them at home), so the results show usage rates far lower than the real deal. Last year, when Italian officials tested the Po River, they discovered previous estimates for cocaine use were way off.
According to official Italian statistics, 1.1 per cent of people between the ages of 15 and 34 admit to having used cocaine “at least once in the preceding month”. Almost all cocaine use occurs in this age group.Assuming that there are 1.4 million young adults in the Po River basin, the official statistics suggest that there would be 15,000 cocaine-use events per month. But the evidence from the water suggests that the real usage is about 40,000 doses a day, a vastly greater figure.
Hmm… Statistics for Washington estimate 8.52% of people have used an illicit drug in the past month; I wonder what the real numbers look like.
I'd guess about double that amount is realistic, maybe slightly more. That of course is people that are using drugs they know to be illegal. If you factor in those who habitually abuse prescription or over the counter meds, that number would probably triple, which I think is more relevant as a public health issue, but isn't neccessarily the info the feds might be interested in.
We live in a country where the government reserves the right to lock up 10% of the population at just about any given time... for self-medicating? For smoking pot? For picking mushrooms?
Nuts.
Would it help if we mailed our stool samples to the DEA? You know, for statistical purposes.
To insure accurate reporting, all participants would of course have to remain anonymous.
Does that account for dealers and possessors who flush their coke down the toilet to elude the wrath the authorities?
Gomez, scientists in Italy wondered the same thing. This answer comes from the Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-1721874,00.html):
"To confirm their findings, the team also sampled urban waste water from Cagliari in Sardinia, Latina in central Italy, and from Cuneo and Varese in the north — all medium-sized cities. The values they obtained from the undiluted waste water were far higher than those in the Po, as would be expected. But when translated into likely local use of the drug, they produced very similar figures — which suggests that the Po region is not exceptional in its cocaine consumption. The results cannot be explained by assuming that some drug trafficker was panicked into dumping his stash down the lavatory. If so, much more pure cocaine would have been found, and much less of its human metabolite, BE. In fact, the ratio of cocaine to BE was consistent throughout all the samples."
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