Wastewater Used To Map Illicit Drug Use

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — A team of researchers has mapped patterns of illicit drug use across the state of Oregon using a method of sampling municipal wastewater before it is treated.
"This work is the first to demonstrate the use of wastewater samples for spatial analyses, a relatively simple and cost-effective approach to measuring community drug use," said Banta-Green, lead author of the paper. "Current measures of the true prevalence of drug use are severely limited both by cost and methodological issues. We believe these data have great utility as a population measure of drug use and provide further evidence of the validity of this methodology."...measured as index loads, of three stimulant drugs: methamphetamine, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, or ecstasy), and benzoylecgonine (BZE, a cocaine metabolite).
They found that the index loads of BZE were significantly higher in urban areas and below the level of detection in some rural areas. Methamphetamine was present in all municipalities, rural and urban. MDMA was at quantifiable levels in less than half of the communities, with a significant trend toward higher index loads in more urban areas.




Wastewater Used To Map Illicit Drug Use