Italian mussels are different?
[url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1542894,00.html[/url]
"River tests expose cocaine use
Tim Radford, science editor
Friday August 5, 2005
The Guardian
Tests on the River Po in Italy have proved an effective way of gauging
levels of substance abuse - thanks to the presence of human byproducts
from cocaine in the water.
Researchers found the equivalent of 4kg a day of Colombia's most
famous export being washed into the Adriatic, showing that Italians
were consuming far more cocaine than figures had indicated.
Surveys, crime statistics and other estimates suggested that 15,000
young adults in the region of the Po - which flows from the Alps to
the Adriatic, its valley home to about five million people - admitted
to using cocaine, about once a month.
But the river data tell another story - that at least 40,000 people
now snort, smoke or inject 100mg of the substance every day. Ettore
Zuccato, of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, in
Milan, and colleagues, today state, in the journal Environmental
Health, that as cocaine users excrete benzoylecgonine in their urine,
and as the byproduct has no other source, the sewage water of the
cities and the Po itself does give an accurate picture.
"We expected our field data on cocaine consumption to give estimates
within the range of official estimates, or perhaps lower, but
certainly not higher," they write.
The results suggested that 27 in 1,000 people in the region, aged 15
to 34, took the drug daily. "The large amount of cocaine [at least
1,500kg, or almost one and a half tonnes] our findings suggest are
consumed per year in the River Po basin would amount to about $150m
[£85m] in street value."
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Martin
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