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."

Tracing Of Users?

[excelblue (739986)]

I wonder, if they start doing more and more extensive tests, could they eventually determine the household in which the drugs come from? What's preventing them from testing the sewer water directly out of a house, instead of a waste plant.

Will there be a need for sewer search warrants in the future? Hmm...

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[Cassius Corodes (1084513)]

How long before this information is used by drug lords for marketing? I wouldn't be surprised if they were interesting in funding further consumer studies.

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[by Anonymous Coward]

From now on I'm only relieving myself on the neighbor's lawn.

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[drsmithy (35869)]

I wonder, if they start doing more and more extensive tests, could they eventually determine the household in which the drugs come from? What's preventing them from testing the sewer water directly out of a house, instead of a waste plant.

Economics.

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[surrealestate (993302)]

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?

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[NMerriam (15122)]

Would it not be the same as searching the garbage you put out on the street?

The difference being that if you have something incriminating to get rid of, you don't have to throw it in your trash can and leave it on the curb. In essence, the laws on trash are basically that you don't need to be "authorized" in order to pick up garbage, recycle it, dispose of it, reuse it, compost it, etc.

In contrast, people don't generally have an option of what to do with their urine and feces -- for most people, it's leaving the building in a wastewater pipe. And you do need the be licensed out the wazoo and have legal agreements with a homeowner and the state before you can just tap into wastewater outflow.

I suspect it would come down to the "expectation of privacy" standard, and most people don't expect their wastewater can be seen by anyone before it is processed, but it's a normal expectation that anyone can peek in an unsecured garbage can.

Re:Tracing Of Users?

[Chris Pimlott (16212)]

Oh boy, I smell the premise for a new episode of Law & Order...

Utah results are in...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Results for Salt Lake City show very high levels of LDS

I took a massive dose of LDS...

[AmazingRuss (555076)]

...at a Judas Priest show in Salt Lake City. Caused me to see legions of wide-bottomed, watery eyed blond folks in suits on ten speeds.

I'll never touch the stuff again.

And most importantly

[by Anonymous Coward]

They'll also be able to tell if your city is pregnant

Stupidity reaching new lows

[infonography (566403)]

This drug war foolishness is getting out of hand.

My standing policy for piss testing is they have to collect it orally if they want if from me. Hot from the pipe.

Maybe it COULD be personally identifiable..

[Reziac (43301)]

... if any of the, uh, extruded chemicals are bound to DNA, say from cells shed from the drug user's intestinal wall. Yeah, it's not practical (yet) to DNA-scan the entire populace, but I can foresee this being used to catch probation/parole violations (given that discontinuing drug use is often a condition of remaining loose on parole), where the perp's DNA is already on file.

Take it one step further: insurance companies who don't want druggie-risks in their system, who might start requiring DNA on file as a condition of being insured.

This has disturbing implications re privacy -- not now, but quite possibly a decade or two from now, especially given the direction the world is headed.

They can have my shit ...

[bcrowell (177657)]

... when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Drugs by SIC code

[Saint Stephen (19450)]

In 1994 I had about 40 million drug test results on my 486-50 woo hoo! (I was writing a Microsoft Access program for the guy.)

Anyway, I did a GROUP BY sic code and drug, descending frequency. The highest was construction workers, pot and cocaine. The second highest was school employees, alcohol. This doesn't mean who does what -- this means who gets busted for what in the tests, very different. Everything else was non-clustered.

BTW, the guy had the hottest girls for reception and collecting specimens. I think he hired girls who didn't pass the tests to work for him. Fun girls ;-)

Pillheads :-)

And this was posted by none other than....

[zuki (845560)]

Original Post Submitted By -> Ellis D. Tripp

This is just pure coincidence, right?

Z.

This Is A Polutant Thang, Not The Drug War

[cmholm (69081)]

The research lead, Jennifer Fields, has studied a number of waste water polutants, so scanning for narcotics is just another piece of the puzzle for waste water treatment. Gone (in the US) are the days when you could just disinfect public water with chlorine at the input and shoot it straight into a river at the output.

Now, water planners have to consider a much wider range of crap, from all the acetaminophen, birth control hormones, caffeine, and - yes - dope we're pissing away, as well as the usual collection of bacteria, viruses, organic matter, pez dispensers, and whatnot. It's not only that you don't want that stuff in the water supply, you don't want it collecting in the fish from the lake, Bambi's mom in the woods, or that water you merely boiled when out camping.

So, an increasing number water districts have to collect this information anyway. All that Fields did was analyze a portion of the data more intently. If your jurisdiction plans to stick a sensor into your waste stream at a point immediately before it commingles with that from your neighbors, you'll know about it 'way ahead of time, because it would be a Major project. Frankly, most water districts are so busy trying to keep everything flowing in the right direction, they couldn't be less interested in wasting time checking on your THC-related metabolic byproducts.

Re:meth

[Verteiron (224042)]

Actually the steady meth usage is probably from legal prescription drugs like ritalin and adderall. Drug tests can't distinguish them from illegal methamphetamines.

ADD

[Upaut (670171)]

I have a couple of friends with a prescription for meth-amphetamines for their ADD, as they are basically immune to all the other drugs that have been tried on them. My girlfriend has a prescription for THC as it is the only mood elevator that can control her bipolar condition. I have overactive production of an enzyme CYP2D6, meaning my medicine cabinet would make a heroin addict drool.

We all have constant levels in our systems, stable jobs, and interact well in society. Just because someone needs to take these drugs do not mean that we cannot hold a job, or that we are scabs on society... And just because (aside from the THC, which is not addictive) our meds are addictive, does not mean our usage varies, because we take our daily dose as covered by our medical insurance.

Re:meth

[evanbd (210358)]

Not all drugs are actually as addictive as the authorities would like you to believe. I regularly take amphetamines -- on prescription, for ADD. I don't take them every day, and I don't abuse them by staying up for days at a time. Heroin and the other opiates are actually similar -- addictiveness varies person to person, and is dependent on dose, usage pattern, and most interestingly the environment the person is in. People in a happy environment can be regular recreational users without showing evidence of addiction. Perhaps the most interesting lab study of this was the Rat Park [wikipedia.org] study -- interestingly enough, when you stopped stuffing the lab rats in tiny boring cages and gave them an interesting environment to live in, they lost interest in the morphine. Even when the morphine water was sweetened. Perhaps even more interestingly, *some* of the rats *sometimes* used the morphine in the better environment -- a pattern we might call occasional recreational use in a person.

Re:So when does privacy end?

[drsmithy (35869)]

As much as the "well they are breaking the law/what do you have to hide" appeals to me, [...]

It shoudn't. That's the sort of attitude tyrants depend on.

Just wondering how you guys would draw the line.

Well before the prosecution of victimless crimes like drug use. Alas, the legal system in most countries is far beyond where I would draw the line.

Re:but.....

[martinelli (1082609)]

No, actually. They look for the levels of drug 'remnants' in your urine, not the actual substance.

Re:but.....

[Mr. Roadkill (731328)]

what if someone flushes a bag of drugs cuz they know the police are gonna search their house? That'd make it look like 1000 people overdosed at once lol

Although some of most drugs will probably be excreted untransformed, what they're probably looking for in the waste is particular metabolites. So, by looking for both drug metabolites and the actual drug they can probably identify both consumers and flushers.

Another interesting application, if they check further upstream, could be identifying areas containing drug labs. Looking for high concentrations of drugs and various manufacturing by-products in the waste stream could identify neighbourhoods containing labs. I used to be vaguely acquainted with a police forensic chemist who told me that they regularly laughed at some of the amphetamine labs they busted - in some cases, 60%-80% of their yield was going down the drain.

Re:but.....

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The drug profile of my neighborhood's sewage

[thc69 (98798)]

Please allow me to take this opportunity to agree with you.

Mmmm....tequila.

Next slashdot poll: Favorite tequila
  - Cabo Wabo
  - Oro Azul
  - Don Julio
  - Jose Ceurvo
  - Sauza
  - CabelleroNeal

Blow Me

[Zero__Kelvin (151819)]

"As long as drug use remains illegal, lamenting a particular detection/enforcement method is foolish."

... and you would surely agree that, as long as fellatio is illegal (as it is in many, many US states), lamenting the uninvited entry of police in your bedroom during sexual interaction is foolish ... Do you think before you type?