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Researchers Drug-Test Italian River

Posted on: Thursday, 11 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

Sports teams and workers routinely undergo screening designed to detect illegal drugs. But Italian researchers have done a drug test on an entire region _ and found that consumption seems to be considerably higher than people admit in drug-use surveys.

This was not the average urine test in a cup, however. They drug-tested a river.

Ettore Zuccato and colleagues at the Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan measured levels of a cocaine residue called benzoylecgonine (BE) in the Po River and in the sewage water of several medium-sized Italian cities in the region.

The residue is a byproduct of cocaine being metabolized in the human body and cannot be produced from any other source, so it is considered a good environmental marker of drug use.

"Our main goal was initially to verify how our consumption estimates compared with official figures," Zuccato said. "We expected our field data on consumption to give estimates within the range of the official estimates, or perhaps lower, but certainly not higher."

But the results, reported online in the journal Environmental Health, were much higher _ at least three times higher _ than official estimates of cocaine use in the Po Valley.

The researchers found that the Po, the largest Italian river, with some 5 million people living around it, steadily carried the equivalent of about 4 kilograms of cocaine a day.

This suggests an average daily use of 27 doses of 100 milligrams of cocaine for every 1,000 people ages 15 to 34 _ the main consumers of cocaine. Readings from the municipal sewer systems yielded similar numbers.

In the Po Valley, that translates into at least 40,000 doses of cocaine being used every day. Yet official national estimates of cocaine use indicate that 15,000 young adults living in the Po Valley admit to taking the drug at least once a month.

The study is among a number of recent reports revealing high concentrations of legal and illegal drug residues in waterways across Europe, but it is among the first to assess illegal drug use compared with government estimates.

Estimates of drug use are also obtained from medical and criminal records, but most reporting is via surveys that ask people to reveal that they are using illegal drugs, something many users tend to lie about.

Zuccato said the new stream- and sewer-testing approach holds promise for tracking drug-use trends and targeting efforts to control abuse. But he warned that "clearly, the method needs to be refined and validated and adapted for other drugs of abuse before it can become a general tool for monitoring drug abuse."

On the Net: www.ehjournal.net/

(Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)

© 2005 Scripps Howard News Service.

All Rights Reserved.

Source: Scripps Howard

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