Make Mine Rainwater

There's something genuinely depressing about finding a
nation's water supply to be contaminated by antidepressants. Makes you wonder about the hypocrisy of those who condemn recreational drugs too.

Newspaper
August 11, 2004

Make Mine Rainwater
Perhaps you recall the line from "Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's film - now 40 years old - about nuclear war and fluoridation. "As human beings," Gen. Jack D. Ripper says to Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, "you and I need fresh pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids." Hard to imagine what General Ripper would have thought of the recent announcement by Britain's Environment Agency that it had found traces of the antidepressant drug Prozac in rivers and groundwater.

The idea of someone dumping mood-altering pharmaceuticals into the water supply sounds suitably Strangelovian. But the source in this case is humans, whose consumption of antidepressants has risen at an alarming rate - to 24 million prescriptions in Britain in 2001 from some 9 million in 1991.

The actual level of contamination was not announced. It's likely to be very low, but there is not much reassurance in that. In fact, there's something genuinely depressing about finding a nation's water supply to be contaminated by antidepressants.

Britain is hardly alone in finding weird stuff coming out of the tap. Surveys of some American water supplies have turned up traces of everything from hormones to antibiotics. It makes you wonder what other drugs are lurking in the water and in what proportions. If Prozac is present, can Viagra be far behind?

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