Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: What the wastewater tells us about drugs

Alfie

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 16:21:34 +1300

Cops and choppers
Police in the Eastern District (Waipukurau to the top of East Cape) — have located in excess of 10,000 cannabis plants this season. The cops there must have a better budget than the Tasman boys because they had "aerial support over 10 days from a plane and a…

Katharine Moody

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:15:09 +1300

All in the service of making meth look safer and easier to trade in than weed.

Yes, it's criminal – the failure of our politicians, that is.

Moz

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:01:27 +1300

men-charged-after-importing-160-litres-of-meth-labelled-as-dishwashing-liquid

Lift imitates art: I wonder if they chose that because it's bright green and fluoresces under UV, so it looks good as a movie prop liquid?

Ian Dalziel

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 08:35:40 +1300

This could muddy the waters,
er, add to the murk,
er, clear things up?
...it's complicated!
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/90460912/four-men-charged-after-importing-160-litres-of-meth-labelled-as-dishwashing-liquid

Moz

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:52:19 +1300

Ooops, you're right. I misspoke.

Rich of Observationz

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:47:23 +1300

To be more accurate, they aren't supposed to sell any weed they confiscate, and they certainly don't return any proceeds to the public purse.

william blake

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:40:10 +1300

With the result of forcing the price of cannabis up or worse creating such a scarcity of NZs (illicit) drug of choice, that people turn to methamphetamine.

Moz

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 11:30:21 +1300

What's the cost of tying up thirty cops for two weeks, plus helicopters? I bet it far exceeds the retail value of 1,300 plants.

Unlike some other confiscated goods, police don't actually sell the cannabis they find on those expeditions. So any cost-benefit analysis based on what undercover cops pay…

Alfie

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 11:09:47 +1300

Whoops... my bad Ian. And Russell is right. The amount of resource Police devote to chasing a relatively benign weed is out of proportion when NZ's main drug problem is meth.

At least the cops appear to have ceased their rather silly practice of quoting invented and over-inflated dollar amounts…

Russell Brown

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 10:53:18 +1300

Doesn’t it say that they didn’t use the choppers this time for the 1300 plant haul?

It does.

But man, that's still 30 officers who could have been doing something else, 50 site visits and who-knows-how-much paperwork time to get it all to court. All in the service of making…

Ian Dalziel

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 10:09:37 +1300

plus helicopters
Doesn't it say that they didn't use the choppers this time for the 1300 plant haul?

Alfie

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 09:26:55 +1300

Along the same lines... West Coast cannabis haul plummets 43 per cent
This year's annual cannabis operation on the Coast netted less than half the number of cannabis plants found last year when police used helicopters in the search.

Police announced yesterday they had seized 1300 cannabis plants across the Coast…

Russell Brown

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 08:46:36 +1300

Oh – look at that. Tasman police put down the flying toys this summer.

A 75 per cent drop in cannabis plants recovered from the annual top of the south and the West Coast drug operation followed a police decision not to use helicopters this year.

Police said on Monday…

Ian Dalziel

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 07:49:04 +1300

Step right up!
Outright incredible that the byproducts of 600g of any substance is detectable in the hundreds of millions of liters of wastewater produced in Auckland daily.
I detect a viable market for Homoeopathic P -water!

Meanwhile back at Viagra Falls,
Holmes is over a barrel....

BenWilson

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 23:15:21 +1300

It really doesn’t make sense.

Sure doesn't. Meanwhile lots of people die from alcohol, and many lives, careers, and families (not to mention brain cells) are destroyed by alcohol every year, and you can still freely buy from the corner dairy tobacco that basically ruins the health of and then…

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:44:13 +1300

This is actually what bugged me about the Proceeds of Crime cash going to yet more helicopter recovery.

It makes a good press release, but it’s hugely expensive and while it might cause some short-term supply reduction, it does not at all reduce the use of cannabis or make that…

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:35:08 +1300

Outright incredible that the byproducts of 600g of any substance is detectable in the hundreds of millions of liters of wastewater produced in Auckland daily.M

It is, huh? But this is a well-established form of sampling these days.

Also incredible to think that the entire daily consumption of P in…

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:32:23 +1300

Ritalin isn’t an amphetamine, it isn’t even a phenylamine, so unlikely to test similarly.

You're right! I'd somehow thought it was technically an amphetamine, but I was wrong.

BenWilson

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:18:05 +1300

Pretty amazing idea. Hard to see how a steady flow of this kind of information could be anything but a boon for informing public policy on a whole range of issues.

Outright incredible that the byproducts of 600g of any substance is detectable in the hundreds of millions of liters…

linger

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:14:52 +1300

if it’s good enough for Bill EnglishKnew he had to be on something to be coming out with that … :-)

Joe Wylie

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:00:10 +1300

Ritalin isn't an amphetamine, it isn't even a phenylamine, so unlikely to test similarly.

Thought so. Back when recreational methamphetamine was sourced from compliant doctors, who'd prescribe pharmaceutical methedrine largely for weight loss, users disparaged ritalin as "plastic meth" once they discovered that popping it wasn't much fun.

As even…

Thomas Lumley

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:05:46 +1300

Ritalin's not, but there is an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD.

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:06:04 +1300

Ritalin isn't an amphetamine, it isn't even a phenylamine, so unlikely to test similarly.

Stamper Stamp

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:04:02 +1300

So?
What does this tell us about the anecdotal evidence which P.M. English has received about drugs being a problem for some Employers trying to hire new drug free staff?

Paul Campbell

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:15:57 +1300

Of course some of those are legal drugs – I had surgery last week and they sent me home with codeine ... I guess you have to control for legal doses to get something meaningful

I wonder if sudafed/etc show up as meth?

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:49:27 +1300

Ah, that makes sense. Cheers.

linger

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 14:26:52 +1300

Creatinine could be a more general control for volume of kidney output, as opposed to volume of water flow through the sewage system, which will also depend on other factors such as rainfall; hence it would allow normalisation of other readings to refer back to numbers of people.

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:55:28 +1300

Is Ritalin a methamphetamine?

I forgot to ask Chris about that, but I think it would be picked up as an amphetamine (which were fairly prevalent, in about 60% of samples), not methamphetamine.

Russell Brown

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:30:56 +1300

I’d assume that since typical LSD doses are physically about a thousand times less than most other drugs, then detection would be a substantial challenge.

Yes, I thought that would have been the reason too.

What I’d be interested in is whether the researchers have considered using commonly prescribed drugs…

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:26:25 +1300

I'd assume that since typical LSD doses are physically about a thousand times less than most other drugs, then detection would be a substantial challenge.

What I'd be interested in is whether the researchers have considered using commonly prescribed drugs (ACE inhibitors, or antibiotics, for instance) as a baseline reference…

Public Address

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:26:25 +1300

Discussion from blog post.