Brave New World - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 56

Studies in Germany confirmed Zuccato's findings, and later studies in the United
States discovered that recycled water contains small amounts of pharmaceuticals and
steroids—antibiotics, birth-control hormones, anticholesterol drugs, Valium, and Via-
gra, among others. Some of these drugs are resistant to our most advanced three-stage
treatments, which, to some minds, raises questions about the safety of using recycled
gray water, which is increasingly being mixed with natural supplies.
While scientists doubt that trace amounts of pharmaceuticals have any impact on
human beings, little is known about how a cocktail of many such drugs might work
in concert, or their effects on wildlife—frogs that ingest Prozac, say, or mosquitoes ex-
posed to antiseizure drugs, or fish that swim in synthetic estrogen (which might be one
cause of intersex, in which male fish grow eggs or female ovarian tissue—a phenomen-
on I will discuss in the next chapter).
At one site along the Po River, Zuccato's team noticed something strange: a high con-
centration of the antiasthma drug salbutamol. “There was no obvious reason for this,”
Zuccato told me. “Health records indicated that incidence of asthma in the area was
normal.”
The scientists began to interview the local cattle and pig farmers. Within days, they
had an answer: the farmers had been using salbutamol (a human drug) illegally as a
promoter of muscle growth in their livestock. The mass spectrometer allowed the sci-
entists to identify, accurately and objectively, how much of the drug had been used.
The Mario Negri Institute is a small private pharmacological institute named for the
jeweler who funds it. At a meeting in 2005, Zuccato was discussing his research with
his team when his boss, Dr. Roberto Fanelli, wondered, “If we can determine how much
unrecorded use of a legaldrug there is, can we do the same for an illegaldrug?”
Zuccato thought for a moment, then said he could probably devise a test for cocaine,
a narcotic that has become increasingly popular in Western Europe.
In the spring of 2005, Zuccato's team took samples from the Po River and measured
the level of benzoylecgonine (BE), the major metabolite of cocaine (BE cannot be pro-
duced by other means), in the water. They were astonished by what they found: “Co-
caine use was far, far greater than we had anticipated,” Zuccato says.
Italian officials had estimated that the 5 million inhabitants of the Po River valley
used about fifteen thousand doses of cocaine per month. (A typical line is about fifty
to seventy-five milligrams of cocaine.) But Zuccato's test revealed that the real num-
ber is over forty thousand doses per day. “The economic impact of trafficking such a
large amount of cocaine—at least fifteen hundred kilograms per year—is staggering,”
says Zuccato. “This amounts to about 150 million dollars in street value. Not to mention
the legal issues, social impact, and long-term health problems associated with such an
[addictive] drug.”