Remember Back in the Old America, When It Was Just Syringes and Shit Like that in the Water Supply?
The AP reports that your drinking water may contain "antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones" from prescription drugs. I was holding out for higher-than-trace levels of Oxycontin and Darvocet, but no such luck:
-Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.
-Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.
-Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.
-A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.
-The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.
-Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.
The drugs, which were found everywhere tests were made, get in the water from many sources, but especially people's waste, apparently. Though wastewater is cleaned and treated, some of this special sort of runoff still ends up back in the drinking supply.
In such tiny amounts that there's no effect on anything but, as one scientist noted, "We know we are being exposed to other people's drugs through our drinking water, and that can't be good."
Maybye, but it might not be bad, either, though it is all a little freaky, to be sure.
The horri-fun-ible 1968 movie, Wild in the Streets, famously featured wild hippie kids dumping LSD in the water supply (a young Richard Pryor actually did the tipping), which sounds way more fun than sucking up even a micronanogram of someone's post-sewage-treatment restless leg syndrome drug.
That crying Indian standing in the garbage dump? Maybe he just didn't drink enough Prozac-laced water that day?
Seems the right time to say that real winners may or may not do drugs (actual results will vary).
But they definitely subscribe to the print edition of reason, the nation's only mag of "Free Minds and Free Markets." It's just $19.97 a year for more kicks--and less than half as many cramps!--than you can find in a gallon of Philadelphia drinking water.
