Link
Rivers of Coke
By Stephen Leahy
Drug enforcement officials may soon have an accurate yet secret way to detect drug use -- the toilets of the world.
Italian scientists discovered that nearly 10 pounds of cocaine residues flow into Italy's Po River every day.
How is Italy's biggest river getting all that coke? From urine. Turns out that coke users, like beer drinkers, just rent their substance of choice. Although in the case of cocaine, it's transformed by the liver into benzoylecgonine, or BE, before being excreted. BE can't be produced by any other means, so when it's found in your urine sample, that spells trouble with a big T.
Revealed Friday in the journal Environmental Health, this is the first time the byproducts of illicit drugs like cocaine have been detected in river water.
More surprisingly, the level of residues translates into at least 40,000 daily doses of coke snorted by residents of the Po Valley -- a great deal more than official estimates of 15,000 doses of cocaine per month.
"We expected our field data on cocaine consumption to give estimates within the range of the official estimates, or perhaps lower, but certainly not higher," wrote Ettore Zuccato, of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy.
Zuccato and his co-researchers decided they could use standard lab techniques to test entire cities or regions and get a rough idea of the level of cocaine use. Statistics about drug use are notoriously inaccurate, given that drug users don't generally like to fill out surveys. Since chemistry doesn't lie, this method offers a direct way of measuring how much coke is actually being used.
The researchers first developed a method to measure how much BE was in the surface waters of rivers or in wastewater at sewage-treatment plants using liquid chromatographic separation.
Sampling done at other sewage-treatment plants in various Italian cities confirmed the results.
"There is in fact no reasonable mechanism by which cocaine excretion products could accumulate in flowing surface waters," the authors wrote.
"It's a seminal piece of research," said Christian Daughton, chief of the environmental chemistry branch at the Environmental Protection Agency's Las Vegas laboratory.
Daughton, an expert on pharmaceutical products that find their way into rivers and lakes, first suggested that illicit drug use could be measured this way in 2001. The technique is an anonymous, noninvasive method of measuring drug use in a city or community, he said.
Depending on how far up the sewage system you go, it could also be used to measure drug use in a prison or neighborhood, Daughton said.
"I was shocked that so few scientists showed any interest in the idea at the time," he said.
Since nearly all illicit drugs have unique metabolites akin to BE, all types of drug use could be monitored, Daughton said. Measuring metabolites instead the drug itself also eliminates false readings from dumping large amounts of drugs down the drain.
Daughton said more work is needed to verify that actual drug use corresponds to Zuccato's estimates.
"There's likely more cocaine being used than Zuccato estimates," Daughton said.
'Seminal piece of research' ... he just had to say that ....
