• 🇳🇿 🇲🇲 🇯🇵 🇨🇳 🇦🇺 🇦🇶 🇮🇳
    Australian & Asian
    Drug Discussion

    Welcome Guest!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
  • AADD Moderators: Tronica

NEWS : Sewage testing checks illicit drug use

poledriver

poledriver

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 21, 2005
Messages
11,543
A university study has used sewage to measure illicit drug use in South Australia.

The research was based on a European model and aimed to find out if checking excrement could turn up useful information.

Samples were taken from 15 sewage treatment plants across South Australia and tested for traces of ecstasy, methamphetamines and cocaine.

Professor Rodney Irvine of Adelaide University says the results show South Australians use nearly 10 times more ecstasy than people in Europe but use about 10 times less cocaine.

"It showed that compared to other countries, it would look from this preliminary data that our use of ecstasy and methamphetamine is much higher than say Europe, but our use of cocaine is much lower," he said.

He says there is evidence ecstasy use is more prevalent at weekends.

"We did look at midweek samples and weekend samples, because there was a suggestion that some of these drugs are drugs that would be used more on the weekends than they would during the week," he said.

"And that actually showed up particularly with ecstasy where the weekend use was much much higher that midweek use. There wasn't such a big difference for cocaine and methamphetamine.

"[Ecstasy use was] about four to five times higher on the weekend than it is during the week."

Professor Irvine says the testing is a way to get reliable data quickly.

"Because it is something that can be analysed fairly quickly it means that if you have, say, a public health intervention, you would be able to actually monitor whether it was doing any good or not in a whole population," he said.

"[This] is really quite difficult to do with the current survey methods. Because they take so long to do, it's difficult to monitor on a same-day, week-by-week, month-by-month basis."

He says the testing could be used to measure the effectiveness of government anti-drug campaigns as well as map patterns of regional drug use.

"You could identify whether there were differences in drug use in different regional centres, different cities and so forth," he said.

"It would also allow us to see whether if we had a public health campaign, say against methamphetamine use run by the government, we could actually see whether there was a difference in methamphetamine use in that population, in that city or regional centre over the period of time over that campaign."

Professor Irvine says the work could be expanded to a national level.
Click to expand...

here
 
^ yeah, I could of told them that, and I wouldn't need to analyse shit to do it.

what are they counting as ecstacy these days? Surely, we can't be using 10x more MDMA than europe?!
 
I wonder when and for how long the data was collected. Would be interesting to see if there has been a decline in MDMA over the past couple of years.
 
psytaco said:
what are they counting as ecstacy these days? Surely, we can't be using 10x more MDMA than europe?!
Click to expand...

The mind boggles doesn't it? Everybody knows that there is some MDMA around, but to suggest that it's around to such an extent that we use 10 times more of it here than in Europe (or that it's rivalling pot use (in Queensland) as suggested by Blonde's article post - (I think?) [it is the start of Mushroom season!]) is absurd. Have they started counting dxm and piperazines as ecstasy without informing the public? I imagine that Australians would indeed consume ten times the amount of these substances per capita than Europeans.

MDMAism - A complete and utter demonisation of something beautiful through constant association with something terrible.
 
10 times more in S.A then average in europe. I'd agree they probably included BZP and DXM. Aswell as any MDxx.
 
Professor Rodney Irvine of Adelaide University says the results show South Australians use nearly 10 times more ecstasy than people in Europe but use about 10 times less cocaine.
Click to expand...

Can't wait for his next update on drugs in shit. So informative.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top