One big drug test: Analyzing a city’s sewage can put a number on its vices

George Carlin used to ask, “Raw sewage?  Is anyone actually cooking the stuff?”…

One big drug test: Analyzing a city’s sewage can put a number on its vices – Los Angeles Times
Environmental scientists are beginning to use an unsavory new tool — raw sewage — to paint an accurate portrait of drug abuse in communities. Like one big, citywide urinalysis, tests at municipal sewage plants in many areas of the United States and Europe, including Los Angeles County, have detected illicit drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.

Law enforcement officials have long sought a way to come up with reliable and verifiable calculations of narcotics use, to identify new trends and formulate policies. Surveys, the backbone of drug-use estimates, are only as reliable as the people who answer them. But sewage does not lie.

Since people excrete chemicals in urine and flush it down toilets, measuring raw sewage for street drugs can provide quick, fairly precise snapshots of drug use in communities, even on a particular day.

The results have been intriguing: Methamphetamine levels in sewage are much higher in Las Vegas than in Omaha and Oklahoma City, Okla. Los Angeles County has more cocaine in its sewage than several major European cities. And Londoners apparently are heavier users of heroin than people in cities in Italy and Switzerland.

Cocaine use peaked on Saturdays, while heroin and marijuana use remained steady weeklong.

For now, this new drug test remains anonymous. Wastewater from thousands, sometimes millions, of people is pooled at treatment plants, so it cannot be tracked to any individual or specific location.

But because waste also can be tested in local sewers, questions about privacy have been raised.

“You could take this down to a community, a street, even a house,” [Christian Daughton, chief of environmental chemistry at the EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory] said. “You can do all kinds of stuff with this. It’s sort of unlimited.”

And if I understand the law, you have no privacy rights when it comes to your waste.  Once you set your garbage out by the curb anyone can look through it without a warrant – I would imagine the same rules apply once you flush the toilet.

Imagine the potential for abuse.  The sewage of residents in public housing could be monitored for drug levels and housing could be revoked for a positive test.  Neighborhoods with higher drug levels in sewage could be targeted for more aggressive policing.  Imagine then the backlash – people refusing to urinate in their homes and instead using the street or yard, people not using their own bathrooms but instead waiting for public bathrooms at work or out shopping.

As we’ve suffered through a couple decades now of workplace urine testing, I often joked about how gross it was to be asked to produce your bodily fluids in order to get a job.  I wondered how prevalent drug testing would be if instead of urine you were forced to produce a stool sample.  Now it looks like we’ll all be providing such samples, without knowing it, just by using the bathroom.