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River flowing with cocaine indicates 'vast' drug use

by Shaoni Bhattacharya, NewScientist.com, 5 August 2005

A “vastly larger” number of people than thought may abuse cocaine, suggest the results of a study measuring a breakdown product of the illegal drug in an Italian river.

Levels of a cocaine residue excreted in human urine were measured in the River Po, Italy’s largest river. The river has a catchment basin for about five-million people, with major cities like Turin and Milan situated in the valley.

The equivalent of about 4 kilograms of cocaine flowed in the river each day, say the researchers from Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, and the University of Insubria in Varese.

The analysis indicates that at least 40,000 packets of the drug are snorted each day – 80 times more than the official estimate of just 15,000 doses taken per month by people living in the area. If the study’s estimates are true, a staggering $150 million in street value of cocaine is dealt each year in the valley, say the researchers.

“Our data suggest that actual cocaine consumption may be much greater than estimated by current methods,” say the researchers. “This is a striking result, considering that…the method employed and the assumptions made could only lead to underestimated consumption figures.”

Panicked traffickers

“We were surprised. However we are quite confident about our results,” says Ettore Zuccato, at Mario Negri, who led the study. “This because we measured cocaine and the metabolite benzoylecgonine and compared their ratio.”

The team sampled water from the river at one site on four different days. They also took samples from waste water flowing into water treatment plants serving the medium-sized cities of Cagliari, Latina, Cuneo and Varese. They measured the cocaine and benzoylecgonine levels, which is found in human urine, using mass spectrometry.

The high estimate of cocaine use is still likely to be too low, believe the researchers. This is because some of the cocaine and its metabolites are likely to be lost or degraded before they had reached the sampling sites.

The team thinks panicked traffickers hastily flushing their goods down the toilet is “highly unlikely” to contribute to their estimates, which are based on multiple samplings. Any dumping of cocaine would be picked up by a rise in the cocaine to benzoylecgonine ratio.

Local trends

Zuccato says he hopes the new method, which is first time illegal drug use has been monitored in this way, could be used to assess the use of other street drugs. “Our method has the potential to monitor local drug abuse trends in real time,” he told New Scientist.

But he notes the technique still has drawbacks. “It is quite expensive and needs very sophisticated analytical instrumentation. It also needs several samplings, and this means a lot of work.”

Current public health measures of illegal drug abuse, are based on surveys, medical records and crime statistics.

Journal reference: Environmental Health (DOI:10.1186/1476-069X-4-14)

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