Damn, George Deutsch must have been installed as a White House Drug Defender or something, because they’re doing a urinalysis on an entire set of cities in and around Fairfax County, Virginia by examining the wastewater for “urinary byproducts of cocaine.”
Oh, yeah, I shit you not. Via RAW STORY:
“Apparently, they’re able to ascertain how many people may be using illicit drugs, in this case cocaine, with such studies,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerry Connolly tells WTOP.[…]”It does not indicate that we have an unusual drug problem in Fairfax County,” Connolly says. “I’ll be interested, obviously, in the results. It’s kind of an unusual study and an unusual request. Obviously, we’re prepared to cooperate with any endeavor to try to make sure the use of illicit drugs is discouraged in our community.”
So running a urinalysis on an entire county at the end of a sewer pipe is going to discourage cocaine users?
White House officials believe the wastewater testing will lead to a more accurate index of how many people use drugs than traditional survey research.
So let me see if I can deduce the equation. I mean, if George Deutsch was put in charge of NASA’s publications, I should be able to whip up a handy-dandy formula to figure out how many people are snorting/shooting/smoking the blow, right?
We have P as the number of people pissing during a given… say… hour, ok? Then you’d have I as the number of individuals who ingested cocaine by any method, and we know that every method of injestion has exactly the same urinary byproducts, right? Then we would have S as the selected X hundreds of gallons of wastewater to be tested. Again use S for the humongous fucking temperature strip to go over this gigantic barrel of pissy water. Now we would see E as Examination of sample for cocaine byproducts, and finally we solve for D; Drug Users.
So, without question, the more accurate way to determine how many people in an entire county are doing cocaine would be as follows:
P-I/S+S+E=D
(Cross-posted to: The Psychotic Patriot, Daily Kos, Bring It On!)
Wonder if they factored in false positives?
The tests on wastewater are entirely different than those used on an individual pee sample, as you need to remove all the other impurities to measure the result. False positives are much less likely in these tests (GC/MS).
A certain low level of false positives are tolerated in the quick-and-dirty individual drug tests used on people in exchange for having it cheap and fast enough for mass testing.
I can’t believe you took that seriously!
This is absurd.
Who, I wonder, is gettin’ paid for this piece of terrific brilliance?
Who’s paying?
I can tell you whose making out on this–the rx cos!! They manufacture the testing stuff!!!
Why this isn’t absurd:
There are environmental effects from the pharmaceuticals in wastewater that don’t get fully treated at wastewater plants. Like fish of indeterminant or multiple gender due to the birth control pill hormones in the wastewater reaching the creeks and rivers.
And that effluent becomes the influent for some downstream community’s drinking water.
This has been a major environmental issue in Europe for several years, but the US is falling ever farther behind the curve on environmental issues.
When the wastewater was tested in some northern Italian city (Turin? Milan?) it was found that the rate of drug use was three times what had been believed. (they can estimate it because they know within certain limits how much drug a person will take to get a high but not OD, and how much an average person pees a day…)
This has implications for the crime rate, the public health needs of the community, and estimating the effectiveness of the police force, all from testing some wastewater. Much more cost effective than hiring consultants to do some handwaving mumbo-jumbo and telling you what you want to hear. This is hard data that can be used to measure the effectiveness of drug control programs in a community as a whole – cheaply, quickly, accurately.
Brilliant Sherlock…just when you thought it was safe…better go outside.
Can’t make this shit up…nobody’d believe it.
Peace