2017/01/25

Motherboard January 23, 2017: The Plan to Test Cities’ Sewage for Drugs Is a New Form of Mass Surveillance

Nearly every drug you snort, inject, smoke, butt-plug, vaporize or freebase eventually ends up back in the water supply via your excrement. The fish love it—well, maybe not the ones mutating from it. But apparently crabs and trout aren't the only ones sifting through your waste.

Across the globe, researchers at wastewater treatment plants are testing for psychoactive substances passed by drug users through their feces and urine. The data can be incredibly valuable, letting scientists and law enforcement quickly track drug use trends and identify new substances on the market. It can also measure the impact of drug policy strategies, even highlight which days of the week drug use spikes (cocaine on the weekends, anyone?).

But with this research comes some ethical entanglements. Testing waste could help anticipate the sharp rise in carfentanil or fentanyl overdoses, for example, by detecting the drug in sewage. But the same strategies can be used to stigmatize against certain populations, and as we've seen with the War on Drugs in the US, this could have lasting consequences for those communities.

Wastewater analysis may become commonplace in the United States in a few years, because while there are challenges to getting accurate results, it’s very easy to get samples.

Traditionally, drug epidemiologists have had to rely on questionnaires, but such surveys aren’t cheap and are riddled with response biases since many drug users aren’t keen to tell the truth about breaking the law. On the other hand, you can easily measure all the fallout of drug use: HIV transmission, overdose, rehab check-ins, ER visits, death. But those infrequent incidents only happen after the fact. more