British Drinking Water Contains Measurable Traces Of Cocaine

[Zaune]

... Well, byproducts of metabolising it, anyway.

The Independent

Cocaine use in the UK is now so common that traces of the drug have contaminated the drinking water supply, a report has shown.

In a study to assess the dangers from pharmaceutical compounds appearing in the water we drink, scientists discovered traces of cocaine after it had gone through intensive purification treatments.

Experts from the Drinking Water Inspectorate found supplies contained benzoylecgonine, the metabolised form of the drug that appears once it has passed through the body. It is the same compound that is looked for in urine-based drug tests for cocaine.

Steve Rolles, from the drug policy think tank Transform, told The Sunday Times that the findings were an indication of the scale of the use of the drug in Britain today.

“We have the near highest level of cocaine use in western Europe,” he said. “It has also been getting cheaper and cheaper at the same time as its use has been going up.”

According to the charity DrugScope, there are around 180,000 dependent users of crack cocaine in England, and nearly 700,000 people aged 16-59 are estimated to take cocaine every year in Britain.

As well as benzoylecgonine, scientists also found traces of the common pain-killer ibuprofen and carbamazepine, a drug for treating epilepsy. The drinking water tested also contained significantly higher quantities of caffeine.

Assessing the risk from pharmaceuticals appearing in the water supply, a recent report from Public Health England found that the quantities of cocaine found were around a quarter of what appeared before treatment and, at a dose of just 4 nanograms per litre, was unlikely to represent a danger to the public.

“Intakes of the compounds detected in drinking water are many orders of magnitude lower than levels therapeutic doses,” the report said.

“Estimated exposures for most of the detected compounds are at least thousands of times below doses seen to produce adverse effects in animals and hundreds of thousands below human therapeutic doses.”

“Thus, the detected pharmaceuticals are unlikely to present a risk to health.”

Explains a lot, really.

[cosmicalstorm]

Same thing at Westminster.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nster.html

I remember they made a similar finding at the EU in the mid 2000's. That time some EU representative tried to blame it on the janitors

[Simon_Jester]

The real question is, what process causes this to happen and is it actually grounds for concern?

Our chemical tests for drugs and drug byproducts are highly sensitive, so much so that "measurable traces" can mean a lot of things. The fact that there is detectable caffeine in the water supply (to take an innocuous example from the article) does not prove that someone is dumping coffee into the rivers. It might simply prove that it's not practical to filter out the last molecules of residual caffeine as part of wastewater treatment- so if people at the headwaters of a river drink enough tea, some tiny one-in-a-billion trace of that shows up at the mouth of the river.

[Grumman]

Well, according to this abstract, the peak concentration in a cocaine user's urine is about four orders of magnitude higher than the concentration found here. I would expect that drug testing would write off such small concentrations as negligible, because otherwise the mere fact that it is measurable would be an inherent danger to people who would rather not be arrested for taking illegal drugs.

[Simon_Jester]

It's actually kind of worrying that a cocaine byproduct is being found in drinking water, at a level consistent with only 1:10000 dilution from the peak concentration in a cocaine user's urine.

[Grumman]

It's actually kind of worrying that a cocaine byproduct is being found in drinking water, at a level consistent with only 1:10000 dilution from the peak concentration in a cocaine user's urine.

I was just about to post that. Even if cocaine users were always in that 4-8 hour window, the concentrations they found are only fifty times lower than if you just took the urine of the entire population and tested that.

[Vendetta]

Dammit, we need to dilute it further before we get free homeopathic drugs for all!

[Zixinus]

I am confused. Is this in the water that comes out of the tap, or is this the water that has gone down the drain?

[Broomstick]

The real question is, what process causes this to happen and is it actually grounds for concern?

Since it's the metabolized byproduct my guess would be it comes from cocaine users pissing in the toilet. A LOT of pharmaceuticals and their byproducts enter the watershed by way of the toilet bowl. Alyrium Denryle can probably give us an earful on that and how it affects critters like amphibians.

Our chemical tests for drugs and drug byproducts are highly sensitive, so much so that "measurable traces" can mean a lot of things. The fact that there is detectable caffeine in the water supply (to take an innocuous example from the article) does not prove that someone is dumping coffee into the rivers. It might simply prove that it's not practical to filter out the last molecules of residual caffeine as part of wastewater treatment- so if people at the headwaters of a river drink enough tea, some tiny one-in-a-billion trace of that shows up at the mouth of the river.

A fair number of plants contain caffeine, it's possible that there has always been trace amounts of it in the British water supply though with coffee and tea consumption likely it is higher than it was. Cocaine, however, is not at all native to the British Isles. If you've got cocaine or a metabolite of it in your water supply it has to ultimately be of human origin.

[Simon_Jester]

The real question is, what process causes this to happen and is it actually grounds for concern?

Since it's the metabolized byproduct my guess would be it comes from cocaine users pissing in the toilet. A LOT of pharmaceuticals and their byproducts enter the watershed by way of the toilet bowl. Alyrium Denryle can probably give us an earful on that and how it affects critters like amphibians.

The point is that it seems very unlikely that even as low a figure as 0.01% of all water going into the drinking water reservoir in question should be coming from the bladders of heavy cocaine users. Unless I'm greatly underestimating that effect, I'd expect lower concentrations from it.

[Sea Skimmer]

If I did the conversion right this is four parts per trillion of metabolised cocaine. Sure its measurable, but at that concentration what on earth isn't in water? I'm going to go with motor oil being one of a thousand things that should be way more concerning then this.

[Simon_Jester]

The concentration isn't the issue, it's not that the stuff poses a biochemical hazard.

But suppose the concentration of this substance in a cocaine user's urine, when that user has only just gotten off their high, is... X.

And the concentration of this substance in the drinking water is X/10000.

That say something rather alarming about either the total number of cocaine users, or the proportion of all drinking water that's already passed through someone's bladder on its way downriver.

[Zeropoint]

Don't worry about it; water that's been through so many kidneys should be pretty clean.

[Irbis]

That say something rather alarming about either the total number of cocaine users, or the proportion of all drinking water that's already passed through someone's bladder on its way downriver.

And what do you think happens to all the piss produced by humans? It doesn't magically disappear, it's treated and put back to rivers.

For one, comparing concentration in rivers to whole population might be very misleading. If you think about it, the people most likely to use cocaine are urban dwellers. If you ignore rural populations, cities basically serve as collection points, as processed urine is reintroduced to river from a single point, treatment plant. Thus, it won't be dispersed, it will be concentrated, if you take water sample anywhere near dumping point it will appear much higher than it really is (on average). Both due to fact everyone who uses it lives close, and the by-products, while treated, were also condensed.

Also, I wonder if water isn't used to process cocaine in some way, maybe part of the found samples wasn't stuff that passed through humans, but was in rivers from some other source.

[Dartzap]

Most ten pound notes have minute amounts of cocaine on 'em as well. City slickers pissing money down the bog is well documented.

[Sea Skimmer]

That say something rather alarming about either the total number of cocaine users, or the proportion of all drinking water that's already passed through someone's bladder on its way downriver.

No it doesn't say anything alarming at all when its that incredibly low, just that we have incredibly sensitive chemical tests. And yes, drinking water in the pipes often comes from a place downstream of someone elses sewer treatment works. In the US that can repeat four or five times in some instances, I'm sure the UK has multiple tiers of water use too considering how few major sources it has. Hell in some parts of the world sewage is now directly recycled back into municipal water systems via reverse osmosis, but random trace chemicals are only going to get removed if a dedicated filter stage exists to absorb them. Normal filtration isn't effective against stuff that small, nor is reverse osmosis.

Saying concentration doesn't matter, but that the presence of a chemical is alarming is stupid. You've got arsenic in the water too you know. Would you contend that it doesn't matter if its one part per hundred or an allowed one part per hundred million, which is still far higher then the not actually cocaine presence being talked about here? Of course not.

[Simon_Jester]

That say something rather alarming about either the total number of cocaine users, or the proportion of all drinking water that's already passed through someone's bladder on its way downriver.

And what do you think happens to all the piss produced by humans? It doesn't magically disappear, it's treated and put back to rivers.

I am well aware of this.

However, human bladder capacity is not that large. I would be honestly surprised if the volume of urine produced on any given day in a given area makes up 0.01% of all water flowing through any river. Even more surprised if that's the volume of urine coming specifically from cocaine users.

For one, comparing concentration in rivers to whole population might be very misleading. If you think about it, the people most likely to use cocaine are urban dwellers. If you ignore rural populations, cities basically serve as collection points, as processed urine is reintroduced to river from a single point, treatment plant. Thus, it won't be dispersed, it will be concentrated, if you take water sample anywhere near dumping point it will appear much higher than it really is (on average). Both due to fact everyone who uses it lives close, and the by-products, while treated, were also condensed.

Now THAT is exactly the kind of logical and interesting explanation I was hoping someone would think of. I'm a bit embarrassed it didn't occur to me.

Also, I wonder if water isn't used to process cocaine in some way, maybe part of the found samples wasn't stuff that passed through humans, but was in rivers from some other source.

That is another good and interesting possibility.

That say something rather alarming about either the total number of cocaine users, or the proportion of all drinking water that's already passed through someone's bladder on its way downriver.

No it doesn't say anything alarming at all when its that incredibly low, just that we have incredibly sensitive chemical tests.

OK, I admit that my choice to use the word 'alarming' means everyone with real knowledge will assume I'm a squeamish idiot Chicken Little.

Now, allow me to explain.

The 'alarming' factoid here can be described as follows:

The concentration of this cocaine metabolite in the urine of a crackhead who has recently used cocaine is X. The concentration of this cocaine metabolite in the water supply is 0.01% of X.

This suggests that the water supply is at least 0.01% "former crackhead urine" by volume.

The fact that treated urine ends up in the water supply is not surprising and not alarming.

However, humans don't produce gallons upon gallons of urine a day normally. So in percentage terms, only a small percentage of all water in the water supply should be from urine, as opposed to being from other sorts of processed wastewater, or rainwater that fell and flowed directly into the river, or other sources.

Now, I don't know off the top of my head what this (presumably small) percentage should be. But because it's already a relatively small percentage, it requires a relatively larger proportion of cocaine users in the population to create the cocaine metabolites we see.

In other words, if 10% of all water in the supply were from treated urine in wastewater, then only 0.1% of that treated urine would need to be from cocaine users. If 1% of water in the supply comes from urine, then at least 1% of all people need to be using cocaine, in order to explain the level of cocaine metabolites we see.

Since I'm pretty sure the percentage of treated urine in the water supply is closer to 1% than 10%, that adds up to a lot of cocaine users. Which is alarming.

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about the percentage of treated urine in the wastewater, and it is more like 10%. In which case Britain's water supply is being used so thoroughly that just providing drinking water to the population uses a double digit percentage of all available water supplies in Britain... which is alarming.

Saying concentration doesn't matter, but that the presence of a chemical is alarming is stupid. You've got arsenic in the water too you know. Would you contend that it doesn't matter if its one part per hundred or an allowed one part per hundred million, which is still far higher then the not actually cocaine presence being talked about here? Of course not.

If the arsenic we see in the water supply is coming from the urine of arsenic victims who are being slowly poisoned to death, and the quantity of arsenic we see suggests that there are a great many arsenic poisoning victims out there, then yes that is alarming.

The problem is not the presence of the arsenic in trace quantities; the problem is the implications of its presence.

[Broomstick]

The concentration in the water is also dependent on how quickly the metabolite is broken down in nature. If the breaking down is slower than the addition of more metabolite the chemical will increase in concentration over time. In other words, this might not be just cocaine piss, but an accumulation of cocaine piss from a couple centuries still lurking in the water.

[Irbis]

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about the percentage of treated urine in the wastewater, and it is more like 10%. In which case Britain's water supply is being used so thoroughly that just providing drinking water to the population uses a double digit percentage of all available water supplies in Britain... which is alarming.

Guess who tops density list if you exclude all micro-states. Only 2-3 other big nations have more, all in SE Asia.

For comparison, USA has 32.3, 13.3 times less.

[Simon_Jester]

The concentration in the water is also dependent on how quickly the metabolite is broken down in nature. If the breaking down is slower than the addition of more metabolite the chemical will increase in concentration over time. In other words, this might not be just cocaine piss, but an accumulation of cocaine piss from a couple centuries still lurking in the water.

Ah, now that is very interesting... although in that case, what sample technique are you using, such that the water you sample gets all the extra metabolite that comes in, but none is carried out... oh wait, I think I see.

If the metabolite doesn't break down in nature, then the entire ecosystem is full of the stuff. Except then you wouldn't find it in rainwater or aquifers very much; it'd get washed into the ocean over time and 'new' water reentering the water cycle from springs or rain wouldn't contain any. In which case how would it end up concentrated in any specific part of the drinking water system?

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about the percentage of treated urine in the wastewater, and it is more like 10%. In which case Britain's water supply is being used so thoroughly that just providing drinking water to the population uses a double digit percentage of all available water supplies in Britain... which is alarming.

Guess who tops density list if you exclude all micro-states. Only 2-3 other big nations have more, all in SE Asia.

For comparison, USA has 32.3, 13.3 times less.

Thing is, the amount of water that runs through toilets is only a modest fraction of total household water use, and only a relatively small fraction of that is urine... and that's only household use and I'm not even counting other applications such as industrial water use.

Put this way: average urine production for a healthy human is about 1-2 liters a day. With 56 million people in England and Wales, I'm going to estimate something like 80 million liters of urine being produced.

By contrast, roughly 14.5 billion liters of water are used by English and Welsh consumers, total. And even that is only supposedly about 10% of the total freshwater resources of England and Wales.

So we can tentatively estimate that 145 billion liters of water are introduced to England and Wales each day, and 80/145000 or about 0.055% of that is urine.

So assuming for the sake of argument that the treated urine ends up mixed evenly into all water supplies throughout Britain (as opposed to only appearing downstream of a waste treatment plant), then a random sample of the water supply will be 0.055% urine by volume. If something is a one part per million constituent of the average person's urine, and is not removed by sewage treatment processes, then it will be a 0.00055 part per million constituent of the British water supply. Or 0.55 parts per billion, if that's easier to parse.

So if 20% of all Britons were heavy cocaine users, and this metabolite were a 1 ppm constituent of their urine, then we would expect to see a concentration in the water supply of roughly 0.1 ppb.

Note the 'worrying' part; I said 20% of all people in Britain.



Looking at Grumman's abstract, the peak concentration in a cocaine user's urine is around 75 ug/mL, or (75*10^6) nanograms per liter. It's being found in the British water supply at a concentration of four nanograms per liter.

So if all cocaine users were continuously at their peak dosage, and if 2% of the British population were using cocaine, then... 1.6 million liters per day of addict urine (not a pleasant thought), times 75 million nanograms of cocaine metabolite per liter, equals 120 kilograms of metabolite introduced to the water supply a day.

The article says that levels in the water supply after treatment are a quarter what they were before, so around 30000 grams of that should be getting through treatment... mixed into a total British water supply of 145 billion liters.

Interestingly that gives us a figure of two hundred nanograms per liter, fifty times higher than the reported result. Of course, I'm assuming that all cocaine users have at all times a level of metabolite in their urine equal to the peak level, which means I'm probably overestimating by at least an order of magnitude what the expected concentration ought to be. Probably two.

Hm. Well, I'm not sure I should be surprised then; my back of the envelope calculation indicates that things should be far worse than they really are. Sorry I didn't math it out sooner.

[madd0ct0r]

you're going wildly wrong when you switch from london to the UK as scales. The Uk is densely populated, but a huge chunk of the country is mountain with a chunk more just rural. London is INCREDIBLY densely populated.

Population of London = 8.3 million
Total population of Thames basin = 14million Source: (in 2008. London alone has increase by 0.6mill since then, source)

discharge of thames at london = 65.8m^3 per second.

14 million people @ 1.5L/day = 21000 m^3 a day or 0.243 of m^3 of hot pee per second

that's 0.00369% of the outflow, assuming once through systems

BUT the thames also provides 2/3 of the drinking water in London. I really don't have to time to workout how many cubic meters go around, and how much of the second round stuff goes around a third time, espcially since you'd have to account for popualtion above and below water intakes and sewage outflows. It might be higher then a crude average, if the treatment plants are at the same site.