Drug info - Cocaine concentration measured in various rivers & sewers show very high level of use

[Alfa]

HIGH TIDE ON ITALY'S COCAINE RIVER


ROME - The mighty Po river is not only Italy's longest. It also may be the highest, at least judging by the amount of cocaine coursing through its waters.


Italian scientists, trying to develop a new way of measuring levels of drug abuse, tested the river's waters for excreted cocaine, and for its main urinary metabolic by-product benzoylecgonine.


They say that the equivalent of about US$400,000 worth of cocaine was flowing through the 652 km-long river every day.


That is much higher than official estimates for cocaine consumption, which rely on less objective detection methods, like informal surveys filled out by drug abusers.


"The method tested here ... might be further refined to become a standardised, objective tool for monitoring drug abuse," said the study, led by scientist Ettore Zuccato at the Milan-based Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research.


Taking into account drug concentrations, water flow rates and populations at each sampling site, the study concluded that the average daily use of cocaine along the Po was the equivalent of at least 22-32 doses for every 1,000 young adults.


"The official figures in this area would translate into at least 15,000 cocaine use events per month. We however found evidence of about 40,000 doses per day, a vastly larger estimate," the study said.


The study was published on an open access internet journal.

[Alfa]

That is an exelent way of measuring population drug use. (As long as it measures more than one house at the time. Don't tell Bush about this, otherwise 'he'll personally screw in a sewer measuring device per house. lol. I would be very interested to find out the real drug use figures per country. I'll bet ya that governments will be shocked to learn that the majority of the population or nearthat figure uses some kind of drugs.

[wann]

Yes, indeed. In the Dutch news section there's an article saying there
are about 200 million drug users worldwide; while other studies even
state that the amount of people in the USA who have tried or regularly
use marijuana are easily that high, leave alone the rest of the 5,x
billion people in the world.

[Alfa]

TRACES OF COCAINE IN THAMES INDICATE 'HEALTH CARE TIME BOMB'


So much cocaine is being used in London that traces of the white powdered narcotic can be detected in the River Thames, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper said.


Citing scientific research it had commissioned, it said an estimated two kilograms of cocaine, or 80,000 lines, spill into the river every day after it has passed through users' bodies and sewage treatment plants.


It extrapolated that 150,000 lines of the illegal drug are snorted in the British capital every day, or 15 times more than the official figure given by the Home Office.


"Because of the long-term complications of cocaine use, we are looking at a health care time bomb," clinical toxologist John Henry was quoted as saying.

[Alfa]

Does anyone know what % of cocaine is excreted as cocaine and what % is metabolized? 2 kg's of cocaine a day could mean a whole lot more being used.

[Alfa]

River of cocaine
By James Orr and Nina Goswami
(Filed: 06/11/2005)

To early morning joggers, the sight of a man drawing buckets of water from a boat midstream in the River Thames may have seemed a little unusual.

On board were a team of three scientists, experts in their field, who were for the first time attempting to test for the presence of cocaine in Britain's most famous river.
Their series of sophisticated calculations based on data obtained from Thames water aimed to uncover the true extent of cocaine abuse in the UK.

The results from the Sunday Telegraph investigation make shocking reading. The research suggests that levels of cocaine use in London are 15 times higher than official estimates.
Clinical toxicologist Prof John Henry warned yesterday: "Anyone who persists with using cocaine is inevitably causing damage to their health.
"Because of the long-term complications of cocaine use, we are looking at a healthcare timebomb. It will creep up on us just as surely as tobacco and alcohol have done."

Unlike in the US, where experts claim cocaine use has peaked, the culture of taking the Class A drug in Britain is continuing to grow.
Chemical compounds of the narcotic do not break down easily, making it relatively simple to test for. Traces of the white powder are likely to pass through the user and into sewerage networks. But even when the sewage has been processed and the water returned to the rivers, significant evidence of the drug still remains.

Navigating their way along the Thames aboard the aptly named Watchdog, scientists from Milan's Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research took water samples from a variety of sites.
Dr Chiara Chiabrando, Dr Sara Castiglioni and Dr Ettore Zuccato had previously found the equivalent of 4kg of cocaine per day flowing down the River Po in northern Italy after testing for cocaine and its metabolic by-product, benzoylecgonine.
In Britain, the team began their research in south-west London, taking samples downstream of Mogden sewage-treatment plant near Twickenham. The plant serves 1.8 million Londoners, processing raw sewage from nearby homes.
The scientists then travelled down the river towards Europe's biggest sewage plant, at Beckton, which serves about 3.7 million people in east London.

More tests were done downstream of the plant at Tilbury and then sewage samples running into the treatment sites, known as influent samples, were collected at both Beckton and Mogden. Back in Italy, the team began to analyse the data.
Annual Government crime figures taken from the 2003/04 British Crime Survey estimate that 344,000 people take cocaine in England and Wales each month. Extrapolation from this figure suggested that Londoners were taking 2,397 doses of 100mg per day, the equivalent of 9,588 lines at 25mg per line.

But the sewage samples obtained from Mogden and Beckton plants indicated that the actual figures for cocaine abuse were far higher. Tests found that 37,638 doses of cocaine, or 150,552 lines, are consumed in London every day, nearly 16 times more than the government figure of 2,397 doses.

Astonishingly, scientists even found that water from the Thames already treated by sewage works still held an estimated concentration of 20,000 doses, or 80,000 lines, of cocaine.
This still equates to more than eight times the quantity of cocaine the Government believes to be consumed in London per day.
Overall the team found that out of the 5.5 million Londoners who were served by the two plants, there were an estimated 38 users per 1,000 per day.

Official figures suggest nearly four million people in England and Wales have tried Class A drugs - including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms - at least once.
Their numbers have increased, mainly due to a surge in cocaine use up until 2000, despite the -Government's now-abandoned target of cutting figures by 25 per cent.
Cannabis stands as the most commonly used drug, followed by cocaine, which is now more popular than ecstasy.
Last month Prof Henry revealed an astonishing 10 per cent of patients treated at St Mary's Hospital, west London, for suspected heart attacks and chest pains had recently taken cocaine.
At weekends, he found, that figure rises to almost 50 per cent among the under-40s.
He warned yesterday: "Cocaine causes massive stresses on blood vessels and when those stresses are repeated time and again you end up with coronary heart disease.

"The risk factor in suffering from coronary artery disease is more certain than smoking, high cholesterol or blood pressure."
A spokesman for the drug awareness group -DrugScope added that plunging cocaine prices over the past decade had contributed to its popularity. Petra Maxwell said: "The price of cocaine has seen a drop, particularly in the South-East and London, where a gramme which cost £70 seven years ago can now be bought for £40.

"While the British Crime Survey is widely regarded as the best indication we have of drug use in England and Wales it is flawed as it is less likely to capture the most problematic users."
Dr Chiabrando said: "The concentration levels of cocaine found in the Thames were similar to that in the Po."
After the academics highlighted the horrifying levels of cocaine consumption in northern Italy, experts were forced to re-evaluate crucial implications for health and crime. A spokeswoman from the Home Office insisted: "Tackling drugs remains one of the Government's highest priorities and is backed with record investment.
"The strategy focuses on the most dangerous drugs, the most damaged communities, on problematic drug users and the most vulnerable young people."

[Alfa]

If anyone can get those research papers, I'd be most happy.

[Alfa]

The Belgium minister of health has ordered the universities of Anwerpen eand Luik to start a huge investigation on the use of cocaine. They are going to research sewer water and water purification facilities on 100 locations. Researchers will trace for amounts of benzoylecgonine; the most prominent substance the human body will get rid of after cocaine use. Results will be published next year.

Note that the minister of health has ordered this just before his leave. hahaha. Sort of a political time bomb there.
It's no wonder that no other country has ordered research to reveal the total cocaine use of the nation: as shown in the previous research it will expose a massive national use of cocaine.

[Alfa]

Funny; I just hit this. The US has obviously done simular research but seems to have withheld the results. I wonder why

[top]Sewage Tested for Signs of Cocaine

[top]Fairfax Participating In Federal Program To Assess Drug Use

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 27, 2006; Page B01

If government studies are a reliable guide, about 25,000 residents of Fairfax County -- 2.5 percent of its population -- have used cocaine in the past year. The same data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health suggest that about 9,000 have partaken within the past 30 days.

Those estimates, based on personal and computer-assisted interviews, rely almost completely on the candor of the respondents. The Bush administration, hoping to someday broaden the government's knowledge of illegal drug use, is probing the mysteries of Fairfax's sewage for a clearer picture.

Earlier this month, the county agreed to participate in a White House pilot program to analyze wastewater from communities throughout the Potomac River Basin for the urinary byproducts of cocaine.

"It's a very strange request," Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D) said of the White House program. "We're ready to do anything and everything we can do to eliminate illicit drug use. But I'd want to know a lot more about what this will actually lead to."

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said it is not seeking to single out specific localities. It also is premature, officials said, to conclude that levels of metabolized cocaine in sewage offer a more accurate index of consumption than traditional survey research.

But David Murray, special assistant to national drug czar John P. Walters, said wastewater testing, which has been tried in Europe, "certainly has that potential."
"We think it will be very, very useful," Murray said.

County workers collected five days' worth of water samples between March 13 and March 17 at the pollution control plant in Lorton, according to a March 20 memo from County Executive Anthony H. Griffin to the Board of Supervisors.
The plant, which processes about 67 million gallons of sewage a day, takes in commercial and residential waste from about half the county, including Fairfax City, Vienna and Fort Belvoir.

The samples, which totaled about 500 milliliters, were shipped to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, where they will be analyzed for traces of benzoylecgonine, the main urinary metabolite byproduct of cocaine.
Murray said many other utilities in the region were cooperating but declined to name any. A spokeswoman for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, which provides water and sewer service in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, said she did not know whether the agency was participating in the study.

Griffin's memo to the board was not released to the public until the day after the Fairfax sampling was completed. He did not return a call for comment.

Critics of the administration's drug policies said the effort seemed harmless enough but also wondered what it would add up to.

"It can't hurt to check," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group committed to ending the federal government's war on drugs. "I'm skeptical that it can be a useful gauge for policy analysis."

The wastewater research had its genesis in Europe. Last year, scientists of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan tested the waters of the Po River in northern Italy, to surprising results. According to the Times of London, they concluded that the Po carried the equivalent of about four kilograms of cocaine and estimated that the 1.4 million young adults living in the Po River Basin were consuming about 40,000 doses a day, more than twice the existing national estimates.
To confirm the findings, the researchers studied wastewater from smaller cities in other regions of the country, including Sardinia. After allowing for the difference between water from the Po and undiluted sewage, they said that the results were similar.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032600880.html

[kailey_elise]

I can't believe no one has brought this up yet...

with this information, could there be a way to recapture the cocaine for use?

*snicker*

~Kailey

[Alfa]

We are talking about trace amounts here.

[tayo]

yeah that would be quite an extraction, and so if swim is getting this straight....

people are peeing into this river in italy... or their sewage after being processed still has cocaine traces which means it probably wasnt processed very well. swim will find those numbers on how much is excreted in urine..

[tayo]

okay, the first 3-6 hours after use 1-5% is excreted unchanged as cocaine. and >10% changed to norcocaine and excreted, leaving us with roughly ~85% metabolites? ecgonine methyl ester, ecgonine, and benzoylecgonine. right? and since benzoylecgonine is considered the "main metabolite" we'll say <50% of 85% of changed metabolites is benzoylecgonine, so cocaine metabolized in urine into benzoylecgonine is roughly %37.5.... so a little over a third of what's excreted in up to three days of elimination.. if isolated we could ~triple to get an estimated amount of cocaine used 3 days before... right? this is just swim's logistics here.

...minus whatever is sweat out through the skin, and blown out into tissue.

how does that sound?


metabolism and excretion of cocaine and norcocaine found here, the rest swim figured
http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic2666.htm

[tayo]

Originally Posted by kailey_elise

I can't believe no one has brought this up yet...

with this information, could there be a way to recapture the cocaine for use?

*snicker*

~Kailey

since 1-5% is excreted unchanged in urine within 3-6 hours of administration, it would be possible if you peed after using copious amounts of cocaine, use a solvent, do some acid-base stuff, and you'd have 1-5% cocaine, but swiy would likely also be snorting many other products of urine, that are mainly the toxins the body puts out. that would be extremely desparate measures for a high. for desparate measures, now psilocin on the other hand' some might argue it would be worth saving the urine because one could drink that for effects. but it would be a hassle to dehydrate urine to re-extract cocaine. yucko

[Benga]

in the pipe dreams, please keep in mind that articles were actually talking about trace amounts excreted from urine into sewer / waste water which then made it to the river.... which says a lot on the quality of some european river's water....

b

[kailey_elise]

heh heh heh, just so everyone knows, I wasn't *really* serious - I just remember there's been speculation on the boards in the past re: recapturing cocaine via urine, so I just wanted to ask so no one else would have to. *evil grin*

IIRC, wasn't there some studies a while back about all the hormones in the water from things like birth control? Same idea - hormones excreted in urine gets into the water supply because it passes through the treatment process. Speculations on that (and the hormones in meat) maybe being responsible for girls hitting puberty earlier & earlier.

So, knowing that as well, I wouldn't want to try to recapture ANYTHING from the water; who knows what else passes through bodies unchanged that also gets through the treatment process? *shudder*

It is an interesting idea - the mad scientist inside me wonders about "cleaning" my own urine and such and seeing what can actually be captured & isolated.

But all that probably belongs in another thread.

So, it's not like it was a total joke question, but I was reasonably certain that it wasn't possible - or something you'd want to do, even if it was. *grin*

Thanks for posting all that, Alfa - man, I really appreciate all the work you (and those you choose to moderate) do for this forum; not sure I've ever actually said that before, so I'm doing it now.

Thanks again,

~Kailey

[dbjay417]

I wonder...

If an immensely populated area was rampant with cocaine use for millions of years and these trace amounts were constantly drained into the same water source and eventually collected by soil, could we mine cocaine like gold, quartz or coal? Or at the very least will geologists and anthropologists be able to tell which layer of sediment top soil in 1984 by the shiney fishscale look of the unusually chalky and dry rocks?

LMAO

[beentheredonethatagain]

Check this out,


From: thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank)
Subject: Cocaine-Tainted Dollar Bills
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1993 20:42:35 GMT

From the August 1993 ABA Journal:
"The mere presence of trace amounts of cocaine on a common object ... is insufficient to support a felony conviction of cocaine." Lord v. Florida, 91-2147.
"[T]he evidence of the narcotic-trained dog's alert to [tainted] currency is of extremely little probative weight. . . . It cannot be doubted that contaminated currency is widespread. The presence of trace narcotics on currency does not yield any relevant information whatsoever about the currency's history." US District Court Judge Thomas Wiseman of Nashville, Jones v. DEA, No. 3:91-0520 (April 21, 1993).
"The probability that every single person in the United States is carrying drug-tainted money is almost certain." -- Dr. James Woodford, forensic chemist in Atlanta. Woodford cites a 1989 experiment by Miami toxicologist Dr. William Hearn, who gathered 135 dollar bills from banks in twelve cities. 131 had traces of cocaine.
It also cites a 1985 study by the Miami Herald, which asked eleven prominent local citizens to supply a $20 bill for testing, including the Catholic archbishop, George Bush's son Jeb, and Janet Reno. Ten out of the eleven bills had traces of cocaine.
Finally, there's a reference to an until-now secret 1987 DEA study showing that 1/3 of the money at the Federal Reserve Building in Chicago was tainted with cocaine. It's thought that cocaine is transferred from some bills to agencies' high-speed sorting equipment, which then "distributes" the cocaine to the rest of the nation's currency. It is suggested that the presence of cocaine throughout the nation's money supply will (or, at least, *should*) prevent the use of drug-sniffing dogs.

[Alfa]

I see we have missed on of these studies:

----------------------------
COCAINE USE IN GERMANY
Mountains of Coke along the Rhine

By Markus Becker

Germans, it turns out, snort more coke than originally thought. That is the result of a new study which measured cocaine residue in the country's rivers. Eleven tons of pure cocaine per year -- and that's just in the Rhine River region.

How can you tell how much cocaine a nation snorts? Easy. Just test its waterways. That, at least, seems to be the lesson of a new study in Germany. For two weeks, scientists tested the country's biggest rivers for chemical traces that indicate cocaine consumption. The result? Germans are bigger coke-heads than officials had assumed.

The analysis comes from the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research (IBMP) in Nuremberg. It shows that -- according to tests done near the western German city of Düsseldorf -- the 38.5 million Germans who live in the Rhine River basin snort some 11 tons of pure cocaine each year. Day after day, the chemical traces of 30 kilograms of the white lady flow from the region's commodes and into the water treatment system. The street value of that much charlie is a whopping €4.5 million per day -- or €1.64 billion per year.

Current German government and European Union statistics have 0.8 percent of all Germans between the ages of 18 and 59 -- or some 400,000 people -- snorting blow at least once a year. But those numbers now seem far too conservative.

"If the results from IBMP are correct," says Roland Simon from the Munich Institute for Therapy Research -- which functions as a sort of clearing house for drug-use statistics in Germany -- "then the real number of cocaine users is dramatically higher than previously thought."

Indeed, the new test results make the current statistics laughable. With 38.5 million people living in the Rhine drainage above Düsseldorf, a 0.8 percent user rate would mean that only 184,000 people would be responsible for 11 tons of pure cocaine a year. That breaks down to 60 grams annually or 164 milligrams per day. When one considers that standard street snow has, according to the German Federal Criminal Office, only a 40 percent purity, it would mean the John Blow would have to snort fully 411 milligrams per day -- or 16 healthy lines.

The Nuremberg report is based on a chemical produced by the human body when processing cocaine. Known as Benzoylecgonine, or BE, scientists can determine how much pure cocaine was consumed based on the amount of BE present in wastewater. Making the test even more accurate, Benzoylecgonine remains present in water for a long time and, scientists agree, is only produced when the body breaks down cocaine.

"We don't know of any other way the chemical is produced," says Herbert Käferstein, professor of medicine at the University of Cologne. "That has both to do with the complex chemical structure of both cocaine and Benzoylecgonine."

Käferstein, together with Gerold Kauert, head of the Institute for Forensic Toxicology at the University of Frankfurt, have taken a close look at the IBMP study. The results, they think, could very well be accurate.

Up until now, statistics on cocaine consumption in Germany and elsewhere have been based almost exclusively on surveys. But such a methodology, as noted by the federal crime office in its 2004 report on drug use in Germany, almost always leads to "a considerable underestimation of the true numbers." Hard core drug users, after all, aren't always easily reached when it comes to survey time.

In addition to such surveys, researchers have also relied on numbers provided by drug counselling centers and the police. But when it comes to coke, these too are not terribly reliable sources. An overwhelming majority of users have never sought counselling or gone to rehab. Also, deaths from cocaine overdose tend to be rare and police statistics are largely dependent on how much attention investigators are actually paying to the problem.

The results of the Benzoylecgonine tests run by IBMP were virtually identical for almost all the rivers examined. Wherever treated waste water is pumped into a river, the concentration of BE rises. In Munich for example the water in the Isar River downriver from the city contained 30 times more BE than the water upriver.

In order to draw conclusions about the amount of cocaine consumed, researchers calculated the daily concentration of BE in the rivers and multiplied it by 4.19 because, according to IBMP director Fritz Sörgel, only about a quarter of the cocaine snorted is passed out of the body through urine. In addition, scientists found that about 80 percent of the BE contained in sewage was destroyed in the treatment plants.

"This calculation model is of course a simplification and doesn't take all factors into account," said Sörgel. "But it is sufficient for a solid estimate." Taking into account factors such as the water flowing in from tributaries, rainfall or the presence of cocaine users in towns further upstream, the calculated per capita consumption of cocaine would likely even increase, said Sörgel.

Sörgel admitted that the measurements were snapshots. "But we should have a reliable overall picture because we took samples at different points on different days and different times of the day." He says his study is just "a first step" to looking at drug consumption by analyzing water content. "Of course it is impossible to answer all the questions we have on a first attempt," he says.

Nevertheless he sees the water measurements as potentially a very important contribution to understanding addiction. According to Sörgel, thanks to the latest, highly sensitive ways of measuring the water's contents, rivers can now be analyzed so precisely that even the smallest amounts of Benzoylecgonine can be picked up.

"The example of Heroldsberg has shown us that in towns of 8,000 residents, it is even possible to detect a single 50 to 100 milligram dose of cocaine," says Sörgel. "This way of working is best suited for spot checks of cocaine consumption within the population." Similar studies, although not as extensive as that of the IBMP, have already been carried out in Italy and England, where they created uproar. These studies also indicated that more people were consuming cocaine than originally thought.














Fritz Sörgel is the director of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg.


http://www.spiegel.de/international/...384456,00.html

[Alfa]

Originally Posted by Alfa

The Belgium minister of health has ordered the universities of Anwerpen eand Luik to start a huge investigation on the use of cocaine. They are going to research sewer water and water purification facilities on 100 locations. Researchers will trace for amounts of benzoylecgonine; the most prominent substance the human body will get rid of after cocaine use. Results will be published next year.

Note that the minister of health has ordered this just before his leave. hahaha. Sort of a political time bomb there.
It's no wonder that no other country has ordered research to reveal the total cocaine use of the nation: as shown in the previous research it will expose a massive national use of cocaine.

This research has now been completed and shows very high levels of cocaine use throughout Belgium. Like the studies in Italy, London and the US, cocaine use turns out to be many times higher than previously estimated.

I have not been able to find a English version of the results yet. Since this is the first national monitor of cocaine use ever, I hope that other countries will follow Belgium's example.

The same technique can be used to measure the use of other drugs as well.

Also relevant: When using Cocaine- How much cocaine is used?