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Scientists Drug - Test Whole Cities

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August 21, 2007
Scientists Drug - Test Whole Cities
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:08 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Researchers have figured out how to give an entire
community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's
sewer plant.

The test wouldn't be used to finger any single person as a drug user.
But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the
spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country.

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for
remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They
were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are
taking.

''It's a community urinalysis,'' said Caleb Banta-Green, a University of
Washington drug abuse researcher who was part of the Oregon State team.
The scientists presented their results Tuesday at a meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston.

Two federal agencies have taken samples from U.S. waterways to see if
drug testing a whole city is doable, but they haven't gotten as far as
the Oregon researchers.

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in
methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling
industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities.
Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller
Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a
professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine,
Field said.

Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population,
but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her
relationship with the sewage plant operators.

She plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40
Oregon communities.

The science behind the testing is simple. Nearly every drug -- legal and
illicit -- that people take leaves the body. That waste goes into
toilets and then into wastewater treatment plants.

''Wastewater facilities are wonderful places to understand what humans
consume and excrete,'' Field said.

In the study presented Tuesday, one teaspoon of untreated sewage water
from each of the cities was tested for 15 different drugs. Field said
researchers can't calculate how many people in a town are using drugs.

She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs
except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and
drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs
were steady throughout the week.

Field said her study suggests that a key tool currently used by drug
abuse researchers -- self-reported drug questionnaires -- underestimates
drug use.

''We have so few indicators of current use,'' said Jane Maxwell of the
Addiction Research Institute at the University of Texas, who wasn't part
of the study. ''This could be a very interesting new indicator.''

David Murray, chief scientist for U.S. Office of National Drug Control
Policy, said the idea interests his agency.

Murray said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is testing federal
wastewater samples just to see if that's a good method for monitoring
drug use. But he didn't know how many tests were conducted or where.

The EPA will ''flush out the details'' on testing, Benjamin Grumbles
joked. The EPA assistant administrator said the agency is already
looking at the problem of potential harm to rivers and lakes from legal
pharmaceuticals.

The idea of testing on a citywide basis for drugs makes sense, as long
as it doesn't violate people's privacy, said Tom Angell of the Students
for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based group that wants looser
drug laws.

''This seems to be less offensive than individualized testing,'' he
said.

Dutch Consider Magic Mushroom Ban-Aug. 08, 2007

Wednesday, Aug. 08, 2007

Dutch Consider Magic Mushroom Ban
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1650873,00.html
By Joost van Egmond/Amsterdam
Time Magazine

When Amsterdam police found a disoriented French tourist in his van last
month with his slain dog beside him, he told them he had wanted to free
the animal's mind. He also said he had ingested magic mushrooms, which
contain the hallucinogen psilocybin. The incident played into a running
debate over whether the Netherlands' famously liberal drug laws are too
lax with psychedelic mushrooms. Also in July, a Danish tourist raced his
car through a campsite, and a 19-year old man from Iceland jumped out of
a window; both had taken magic mushrooms, known in Dutch as "paddos," as
had a French teenager who jumped off a bridge to her death in March.

Since then, most parties in the Dutch parliament have been calling for a
clampdown on magic mushrooms. In dried form, the fungi are already
prohibited, but fresh mushrooms can still be legally sold in the
Netherlands. The country's public health minister, Ab Klink, has so far
steered clear of banning psilocybin mushrooms altogether, in part
because his ministry considers it legally problematic to ban a product
that grows naturally. But in May he commissioned fresh research into the
risks of "paddo" use, and has said he would consider the results, due
next month, in deciding how to act.

This being the Netherlands, critics say even that measured reaction is
too precipitous. They argue that while "paddo" use may have been
involved in serious incidents, it's too easy to single out the drug as
the cause of them. Municipal heath services determined that the man who
killed his dog had a psychosis unrelated to the drug, and the Danish
racer consumed alcohol and smoked marijuana before taking his "paddo."
Amsterdam municipal heath services report that the number of
mushroom-related incidents, while rising, is still dwarfed by problems
caused by alcohol. Advocates of a ban counter that the easy availability
of magic mushrooms amounts to an invitation to further tragedies.

There is general agreement, however, that foreigners seem to have more
trouble with 'shrooms that the Dutch themselves do. In Amsterdam, some
90 percent of ambulance dispatches related to magic mushroom use this
year were for foreign visitors, especially from Britain, trailed at a
distance by Italy, the U.S. and France. "Most problems are caused by
foreigners who come here on cheap flights to take as many drugs as they
can find," says Guy Boels, chairman of VLOS, an association of Dutch
magic mushrooms retailers. "They hardly sleep, they drink alcohol and
smoke pot as much as they can and then take a paddo on top of that."

Boels says the risks of reckless behavior are quite small as long as
paddos are not mixed with alcohol or drugs. Still, VLOS supports a
proposed regulation to ban the sale of the mushrooms to minors and calls
for a registration system to identify "weekend tourists." For now, that
watchful but tolerant approach is getting the endorsement of Dutch
public heath experts. Unless the new research commissioned by the
minister arrives at new insights, the government appears more likely to
play the regulation card than to support a total ban on magic mushrooms.