Brits Snort So Much Coke That It's Contaminated the Water Supply
America's own War on Drugs™ is so well documented to the point of self-parody, but what of our ancestral progenitors across the pond? They are all snorting a lot of coke. So much, it would appear, that scientists in the UK say its found its way into the water supply:
a study to assess the dangers from pharmaceutical compounds appearing
in the water we drink, scientists discovered traces of cocaine after it
had gone through intensive purification treatments.
from the Drinking Water Inspectorate found supplies contained
benzoylecgonine, the metabolised form of the drug that appears once it
has passed through the body. It is the same compound that is looked for
in urine-based drug tests for cocaine.
"We have the near highest level of cocaine use in western Europe," Steve Rolles of drug policy think tank Transform, told the Sunday Times. "It has also been getting cheaper and cheaper at the same time as its use has been going up."
But how bad could it be? Oh:
to the charity DrugScope, there are around 180,000 dependent users of
crack cocaine in England, and nearly 700,000 people aged 16-59 are
estimated to take cocaine every year in Britain.
But it's safe to still drink the water, our English friends!
exposures for most of the detected compounds are at least thousands of
times below doses seen to produce adverse effects in animals and
hundreds of thousands below human therapeutic doses."