Nantucket to Test Sewage to See What Hard Drugs Islanders Use

Some might consider this to be the ultimate invasion of privacy. Officials on Nantucket want to know what hard drugs residents are using, so they plan to rifle through their waste, as in – well, you know – to find out.

Is nothing sacred anymore?

The Nantucket Current reported, "Nantucket's health department will soon begin testing the island's sewage for a range of hard drugs to establish a baseline that will help leaders better understand trends in Nantucket's use of illicit substances."

Wow! Really?

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Forced masking, vaxxing, and social distancing seem so yesterday.

The paper reported, "The data could also be used as a tool to anticipate when outreach and intervention become more important for substance abuse prevention organizations and medical providers."

The European Union Drug Agency stated wastewater-based epidemiology has been done in Europe for years. Who knew?

"The analysis of municipal wastewater for drugs and their metabolic products to estimate community consumption is a developing field, involving scientists working in different research areas, including analytical chemistry, physiology, biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology," according to the EUDA.

It's happening here, too.

According to Scientific American, "The process of monitoring health indicators through sewage has become a common way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID." Before the pandemic, "scientists were using the technology to follow a different public health threat: the opioid crisis."

The Current reported sewage is currently being tested for COVID-19 and "those same samples will now be tested for the presence of hard drugs, including cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine, nicotine, and opiates, along with common diseases influenza and RSV."