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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

This is pure clickbait. Sure, opioids are detectable in mussels from Puget Sound. That reflects the sad fact that Puget Sound is horribly polluted. I suspect that levels of some pollutants are high enough to damage human and ecosystem health. Organomercury compounds, for example. But what gets the focus is opioids. Because it's good clickbait.

Edit: Following pesfandiar's link about caffeine pollution in the Pacific Northwest, I found this about Puget Sound:[0]

> Of all the flavors trickling downstream, artificial vanilla dominates the sound, Keil said. For instance, the team found an average of about six milligrams of artificial vanilla per liter of water sampled.

Yes, 6 mg/L in water! That's not trace contamination. But "Puget Sound is vanilla flavored!" isn't so scarey, I guess.

0) https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drin...

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We know there's pollution. However, we do not expect it to be a prescription drug. This isn't a factory dumping lead or some other chemical. This is enough individuals pissing oxy / opiods that it shows up "down stream."

This isn't click bait silly. This is another wake up call. So wake up.

Opioids are really easy to detect. You'll also find hormones from birth control and most likely a whole bunch of other drugs.

I've lived near Puget Sound for 18 years and I didn't know it was polluted (except gasworks park, which I know is a Superfund site).

> Sound Citizen: Students and Citizens Working Together to Evaluate Sources and Fates of Emerging Pollutants in Puget Sound

> SoundCitizen has delivered impacts in both science and education, annually engaging more than 2,000 volunteers, students, and event attendees in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, SoundCitizen tested for 37 different compounds, with the number growing to 110 compounds in 2011. Scientific findings included:

> a pattern in the cycle of ethinylestradiol (pharmacological estrogen) in the natural environment;

> the ubiquitous presence of plasticizers in Puget Sound; and

> abundant anthroquinones (dyes and bleaches) and cyclohexanones (nylons and other synthetic fabrics), which may represent previously unrecognized contaminants in the marine environment.

https://wsg.washington.edu/research/sg-sound-citizen/

No, we have known about drugs in the environment. For many years. In parts of India, it's a bloody nightmare.

But clearly we haven’t woken up enough to do something about it.

I'm not sure what there is to do. It's really hard to remove stuff from wastewater that doesn't sink, float, get metabolized by microorganisms or plants, or get removed by sand filters.

If people literally dying in the streets isn't enough to "wake" people up, an article about opioids in mussels has a very poor chance of doing so, as well.

Because of the hysteria and resulting "OMG DO SOMETHING," the US government has turned it from an opioid (pill) epidemic to a fentanyl and heroin epidemic. Of course the latter is much more difficult (if not impossible) to control, and much, much more dangerous. So as a result of "OMG DO SOMETHING," the US government did probably the worst thing they could have possibly done.

If only there was a long and ugly drug war we could have used to reflect on the success or failure of the US government and it's attempt to control drug use. /s

Every decade, there is a new boogieman drug, just like there is a boogieman -ism. Anarchism, Communism, Satanism, Terrorism. Reefers, LSD, Huffing, Cocaine, Crack, Meth, Nicotine, Jenkem, Pills, Heroin. I have no conclusions to draw, but it is an interesting phenomenon.

Here's how the current battle of the drug war is going.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

That seems pretty obvious to me.

Back in the 70s, I recall that marijuana became less available, and more expensive, for a year or so. So we switched to other drugs. More acid. Cocaine. Various sedatives. And of course, alcohol.

I wouldn't be shocked if prescription drugs were detected in every body of water that is being used for human waste.

Wake up to what, exactly?

Also recreational drugs.

> In a new [~2009] review study, Castiglioni and colleague Ettore Zuccato found that illegal drugs have become "widespread" in surface water in some of Europe's populated areas.

> Likewise, in 2005, Zuccato found that a daily influx of cocaine travels down the Po River, Italy's longest river.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drin...

The same is true for sewer water in Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, etc). Scientists can trace which drugs are popular where.

EDIT quickly found some sources (in Dutch) [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Some are double, but its been tested for a while. Also, at least [3] and [5] are based on European investigation so English source should be available too.

[1] https://www.kwrwater.nl/projecten/drugs-in-het-riool/

[2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2148110-rioolonderzoek-meer-cocaine-g...

[3] http://www.omroepbrabant.nl/?news/213383832/Waterschap+gaat+...

[4] https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/meeste-cocaine-in-amsterdams...

[5] https://www.ed.nl/eindhoven/cocaeniuml-ne-en-amfetamine-rest...

To the fact that you find this normal enough to not be shocking.

If I've know about something problematic for many years, it's no longer "shocking". But I don't necessarily consider such stuff "normal". The situation is still abnormal. Chronically so.

I see articles like these as useful reminders that human actions have consequences which need to be understood and mitigated if they are bad enough.

We don't want to become numb to the signs of systematic and widespread problems.

On the general topic of pollution and what it takes to organize effective responses, a friend recommended this article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

Why is it a wake up? I've seen no data to suggest this is anything more than an novel finding.

Is there an opportunity here for a startup to develop, market and sell an opioid-urine recovery kit?

Huh? "Waste not, want not?"

Most excretion occurs via urine, so it wouldn't be entirely impossible. But daily urine volume is 1-2 liters. And urine starts to smell nasty after a few hours. Also, there are thousands of widely-used drugs, legal and illegal. Even focusing the most damaging ones, that's some serious chemistry.

So filtration seems the best approach. And I see this:

> A new filter membrane based on a covalent organic framework (COF) could help clean up drug-laden wastewater (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201802276).

> The medicines we take often end up in sewage. Wastewater treatment plants struggle to remove these compounds before releasing water back into the environment. Scientists worry that when these molecules end up in the environment, they might contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance or disrupt development in aquatic animals.

> COFs are crystalline porous networks made from small organic elements covalently linked together. They are similar to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are finding uses in hydrogen storage and catalysis. COFs have been used in similar applications, but Jürgen Caro of Leibniz University Hannover thought the materials could make good nanofilters.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i14/COF-filters-small-organi...

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