Waste water

A small piece about cocaine in the Evening Standard caught my eye the other day, a small piece which was spun off a report about waste water from an organisation called the EU drugs monitoring agency (EMCDDA) which has been beavering away in Lisbon for near 20 years, ironically in the EU country which has gone furthest for toleration & decriminalisation, if not legalistion.

This got the statistical antennae twitching. How on earth can you possibly measure drug use by taking samples of waste water? How on earth can you possibly make allowance for the different ways that water gets into the waste water system, the different waste water systems and all the rest of it? Bearing in mind that I would have first come across the piece in the evening, it being the Evening Standard, a time of day when the brain cells may have been given their regular alcohol bath and are in any case getting a bit tired. I note in passing that the EMCDDA does, very properly, include both nicotine and alcohol as being within its brief.

Then today, I get around to looking these people up, to find that they have a well organised web site at http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/ with lots of good stuff available for download, including the report on waste water which started this particular hare running. And so on to find the diagram included above which makes, as it intends, the whole business look much more reasonable.

But I still wonder about the first step, which appears to mean that you measure the concentration of stuff in samples taken from various sewers at various times of day and then gross them up to a population total by applying the total amount of waste water entering the various waste water facilities in the target area during the target period. All of which sounds a bit tricky, but following the references given in the report quickly results in Elsevier asking you to flash the plastic, a business which is presently attracting a lot of adverse comment in the likes of the NYRB. Not right that the public should have to pay to see the results of research which it paid for in the first place, not when the cost of putting those results onto the internet is close to zero. In any event, the hare died before I could get to the plastic and I went back to the matinal tea.