“Community urinalysis”: Drug-testing an entire city via its sewage

This is both wonderfully practical and totally hilarious: A couple of Oregon scientists developed a technique that lets you take a teaspoon of water from a city’s sewer plant and detect which drugs the population is currently using. It’s based on a simple point: Every drug you take eventually comes out in your urine, and a community’s urine all goes in one direction — down the toilet.

They’ve only tested a few different cities, but the regional differences are intriguing:

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually non-existent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field said. [snip]

She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.

This is, of course, largely being viewed as a technique for urban-health analysis and crime prevention: By knowing which drugs are on the rise in a particular city, doctors and police can help prepare for the health implications, and try to combat them. But just imagine the more sordid uses of the information! Like the bragging rights these tests could give to urban decadents, or even travel guides. “New York City — highest per-capital use of injectable heroin in the nation!!

(Thanks to Top 10 Sources for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

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“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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