Have YOU snorted your cocaine today?

[Cymric]

Check out this link. Italian researchers have sampled the waste water bassins in the Po river area, Italy, and concluded from the amounts of cocaine and its break-down products in these bassins that the cocaine (ab)use in this area is a staggering factor 80 higher than the government assumes. An interesing side conclusion is that there is 4 kilograms 'snow' flowing through the Po every day. I wonder when the mob or other shady figures build recycling plants to harvest this drug at almost no cost.

I will eat my shoe if other governments will not apply the same type of research to get a proper indication of how much drugs we truly use. And not how much we say we use.

[Cymric]

I'm not really sure about these breakdown products. If I look them both up with Wikipedia, the nitrogen-bridges in cocaine as well as as its metabolite stick out like sore thumbs. I don't think there are many natural sources for those compounds, especially in the thin soup of pee and poop of a sewer system.

The milage may of course vary for other drugs. MDMA (ecstacy) has a rather odd ring in its structure which is not common as well; morphine/heroin/... have a really weird N-bridge spanning across a nearly flat molecule. I therefore suspect that these compounds and metabolites can be easily traced. This of course is not the case for amphetamine (speed) or gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB, 'the date rape drug'), and to a lesser extent THC. These chemicals are 'simpler': amino-acid like, a few longer straight carbon chains, and so forth. Our bodies should have an easier time with those, and thus break them down further.