The War on Drugs...
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August 05, 2005
Where rivers run high on cocaine
By Nigel Hawkes
Analysis of waste water in Italy shows a startlingly high level of drug
abuse
THE rivers of Italy are flowing with cocaine, say scientists who have
adopted a new approach to measuring the extent of drug misuse. The
biggest river, the Po, carries the equivalent of about 4kg (8lb 13oz)
of the drug a day, with a street value of about £20,000.
Cocaine users among the five million people who live in the Po River
basin in northern Italy consume the drug and excrete its metabolic
by-product, benzoylecgonine (BE). This goes from sewers into the river.
So a team led by Dr Ettore Zuccato, of the Mario Negri Institute for
Pharmacological Research in Milan, estimated the use of cocaine by
testing the waters of the Po for BE, and for any cocaine that had
passed through the body unaltered or reached the sewers in other ways.
What they found surprised them. They calculated that for every 1,000
young adults in the catchment area, about 30 must be taking a daily
dose of 100 milligrams of cocaine, which greatly exceeds official
national figures for cocaine use.
According to official Italian statistics, 1.1 per cent of people
between the ages of 15 and 34 admit to having used cocaine "at least
once in the preceding month". Almost all cocaine use occurs in this
age group.
Assuming that there are 1.4 million young adults in the Po River basin,
the official statistics suggest that there would be 15,000 cocaine-use
events per month. But the evidence from the water suggests that the
real usage is about 40,000 doses a day, a vastly greater figure.
"The economic impact of trafficking such a large amount of cocaine
would be staggering," Dr Zuccato said. "The large amount of cocaine
- at least 1,500kg - that our findings suggest is consumed per year
in the River Po basin would amount, in fact, to about $150 million in
street value, based on an average US street value of $100 per gram."
To confirm their findings, the team also sampled urban waste water from
Cagliari in Sardinia, Latina in central Italy, and from Cuneo and
Varese in the north - all medium-sized cities. The values they
obtained from the undiluted waste water were far higher than those in
the Po, as would be expected. But when translated into likely local use
of the drug, they produced very similar figures - which suggests that
the Po region is not exceptional in its cocaine consumption. The
results cannot be explained by assuming that some drug trafficker was
panicked into dumping his stash down the lavatory. If so, much more
pure cocaine would have been found, and much less of its human
metabolite, BE. In fact, the ratio of cocaine to BE was consistent
throughout all the samples.
If anything, Dr Zuccato said, the method would be expected to
underestimate rather than to overestimate cocaine use, because some
would be lost or absorbed in sediments. So the real consumption may be
even higher.
This method has previously been used by the same team to measure the
by-products of widely-used prescription drugs, and has produced results
consistent with known prescribing patterns. So it seems to work.
The technique has been developed by the Italian team and is complex, as
it needs to be to detect such tiny residues - of the order of
billionths of a gram per litre of water.
The scientists say that the method needs to be tested further before
being brought into general use, but suggest that it would be a more
reliable and much cheaper way of tracking trends in drug use than by
using population surveys.
"The approach tested here, which is in principle adaptable to other
illicit drugs, could be refined and validated to become a general,
rapid method to help estimate drug abuse at the local level," they
report in the journal Environmental Health.
"With its unique ability to monitor changing habits in real time, it
could be helpful to social scientists and authorities for continuously
updating the appraisal of drug abuse."
The levels of the drug and the metabolite found in river water are so
low that any effect on natural life is very unlikely. But this is not
true of all chemicals. Research indicates that chemicals that mimic
natural hormones are having an effect on fish in many rivers, including
"feminising" many male fish. The sources of these chemicals include
hormones excreted by the human body and industrial chemicals that reach
the waterways.
Jigsa...@aol.com
Britain
June 11, 2005
'Everyone does Charlie. I could buy some in this pub right now'
By Carol Midgley
Cocaine has come a long way - from dessert at Notting Hill dinner
parties to the drug of choice in the pubs of Liverpool. Our
correspondent reports on the latest designer must-have for the working
class
FRIDAY night in a stickycarpeted, inner-city pub and Steve, 24, is
weaving his way back from the gents’ having just snorted his second
line of cocaine of the evening. It is 8.30pm.
He bought his first gram of “coke” just over a year ago. The dealer,
who occasionally sells him cannabis, one day offered him a bag at the
“special introductory rate” of £35. That weekend proved to be one of
the best of his life. “I just had a brilliant time,” he said. “You
rarely have a crap night with coke.”
Now, like many of his friends, he buys three grams on two weekends out
of four, which costs him £240. Sunday is spent recovering. But Steve is
not a City broker or the middle-class professional traditionally
associated with cocaine. He is a painter and decorator from Merseyside
and one of the growing number of working-class people who now regularly
use cocaine.
Last month the British Crime Survey revealed that for the first time
cocaine users are more likely to be semi-skilled or skilled manual
workers than members of the professional classes. More than half a
million people are now using Class A drugs every month and cocaine use
has quadrupled since 1996, mainly because it has plummeted in price,
dropping from £80 a gram seven years ago to half that now.
Steve, who earns about £400 a week, says that five years ago he would
never have been able to afford the drug, more synonymous with Notting
Hill dinner parties than northern pubs. “I never thought about it
because it would have been out of my league and it wasn’t so easy to
get anyway,” he said. “We mainly did E [Ecstasy] and the odd joint. But
Charlie [cocaine] — I could buy some in this pub right now.”
Would he call himself dependent on it? “Honestly, during the week I
don’t even think about it. But I find it hard to have a drink now
without thinking, ‘I could just do a line now’. It’s like wanting a
cigarette when you have a pint. So, yeah, in that way I’m dependent but
not to the point that it’s a problem. Every so often we get carried
away and go on a bender but then I just live on my credit cards until I
get paid. I’ve got £ 2,000 (owing) on my card.”
Rock-bottom prices may not be the only reason that cocaine has become
the most popular drug in Britain after cannabis. Ecstasy, the designer
dance drug of the 1990s, now costs as little as £1 a tablet (ten years
ago it was £15) and yet its popularity is waning. Clubbing magazines
talk of young people becoming bored of Ecstasy and figures suggest a 20
per cent drop in use last year. Meanwhile, many 16 to 25-year-olds,
raised in a culture of celebrity worship, see cocaine as a fashion
accessory that bestows glamour on the user.
Russell Newcombe, a senior lecturer in drug use and addiction at
Liverpool John Moores University, says that the shift from
amphetamines, such as Ecstasy and speed, towards cocaine may reflect
the changing values of young people. A significant proportion of young
people today aspire more to celebrity and fame than the dance scene. To
some cocaine is, literally, a taste of celebrity. Dr Newcombe said:
“Many young people today just want to be famous for the hell of it. To
an extent, cocaine goes with that empty-headed attitude.”
Where young girls once aspired to be nurses and teachers a recent
survey showed that a third saw lap dancing as a glamorous job. In
surveys young people say that their ambition is simply to achieve some
sort of celebrity status. Also, Ecstasy has become so adulterated and
weak that for many it has lost its appeal, Dr Newcombe said.
But there is something else that comes with cocaine. Chris Farrell,
counsellor with the Lighthouse Project, a drugs support organisation in
Liverpool, said that some of his clients were heavily in debt — £40 a
gram may be relatively cheap but cocaine is such a “moreish” drug that
before long many people need hundreds of pounds worth just for one
night out.
Dr Newcombe said: “A lot of people I work with are getting into all
kinds of debt. I see people from right across the board, from bus
drivers to solicitors. Debts can range from £5,000 to £20,000. I know
one lad who owes £45,000. A lot of people binge for three or four days
a month, usually after payday.”
Is it worth it to have to stay in for most of the month just for the
sake of one weekend? “There is the glamour thing attached to it. There
are trendy bars and shops now. They want to be part of the scene,” he
said.Most experts agree that parts of Britain are now awash with cheap
cocaine, thanks to well-established smuggling routes via Spain. Drugs
that come in to Liverpool, for instance, supply the North West and
Scotland — where there is a huge cocaine problem and where police last
year seized their first £10 bag of the drug. Petra Maxwell, spokeswoman
for the independent drug adviser Drugscope, said: “Every year we hear
of increasingly large hauls of cocaine. You would expect the price to
go up but it seems to be an indication of the growing size of the
market rather than how much we are making a dent into it.” But the
eventual cost could be dear.
Professor John Reid, a stroke expert at Glasgow University, has said
that cocaine is behind a rise in the number of strokes among people in
their twenties and thirties. Other side-effects include depression,
paranoia and the masking of the effects of drink. Dr Newcombe says that
when the drug is consumed with large quantities of alcohol, as it often
is, it creates a separate drug in the brain that is more toxic than
either cocaine or alcohol.
Cocaine use, however, may have peaked. According to Ms Maxwell, the
biggest increase in cocaine consumption was between 1996 and 2000.
Now there is evidence of a move towards increased use of ketamine, GHB,
2C-i, an hallucinogenic drug, and “magic mushrooms”.
For Steve and his mates though, cocaine is the only drug they are
interested in at the moment. “It’s not like you’re a saddo heroin
addict, is it?” he says. “It’s about having a good time.”
POWDER TRAIL
Cocaine is made from the leaves of the coca shrub, which grows in the
mountainous regions of South America in countries such as Bolivia,
Colombia and Peru
The street price of cocaine has dropped, particularly in the South East
and London. A gram, which would have cost £80 seven years ago, can now
be bought for £40 - £50
Possession can carry a seven-year prison term
It can be smoked or snorted, usually through a rolled-up banknote
It raises body temperature and makes the heart beat faster
The effect lasts 20 - 30 minutes and the drug is highly addictive
Also known as Charlie, C, White, Snow and Toot
Initially fashionable among the smart set, it is now increasingly being
used among the working classes
Donna Evleth
> From: Jigsa...@aol.com
> Organization: http://groups.google.com
> Newsgroups: alt.activism.death-penalty
> Date: 6 Aug 2005 08:45:39 -0700
> Subject: The War on Drugs...
>
> This item is brought to you by the Jigsaw Education, Information and
> News Network.
>
> August 05, 2005
>
> Where rivers run high on cocaine
> By Nigel Hawkes
> Analysis of waste water in Italy shows a startlingly high level of drug
> abuse
What is our source here?
Donna Evleth
Donna Evleth
> From: Jigsa...@aol.com
> Organization: http://groups.google.com
> Newsgroups: alt.activism.death-penalty
> Date: 6 Aug 2005 08:48:14 -0700
> Subject: Re: The War on Drugs...
>
> The War on Drugs, Part 2
>
>
> Britain
>
>
>
> June 11, 2005
What is our source here?
Donna Evleth