Community Urinalysis

Today's New York Times Magazine is its 7th annual "Year in Ideas." There's an alphabetized list of interesting scientific and practical contributions made in 2007 in the issue, and one of them caught my eye. Jennifer Field, an environmental chemist at Oregon State University, has developed an ingenious method of analyzing a community's illicit drug usage. She goes to the community's sewage-treatment plant and then tests the sewer water for traces of whatever drugs she's interested in. The graphic displayed beside this post shows an example chart from this "community urinalysis," adjusted for the size of the population. In other words, these are per-person rates for a community, and she said she finds all kinds of interesting patterns. Cocaine, for instance, in affluent communities spikes on the weekends. Methamphetamine is, of course, high as we expect, and varies from city to city. Meth is a rural, poor, white drug, so I suspect its concentration shows up more in the rural areas of the midwest, the pacific northwest, and increasingly in the southeast.

How great would it be if you had this kind of analysis performed daily in every county in the country, and then made it available to, oh I don't know, some assistant professor of economics somewhere. NIH, are you listening?