Most people these days are on one prescription drug or another. Americans are depressed, we have liver problems, need weight loss aids, have heart issues, experience chronic pain. Pharmaceuticals are in everyone’s home and no one ever thinks about how their prescriptions might affect another person. Prescriptions are personal; you’re not supposed to share them. But that’s exactly what you’re doing every time you drink water from the tap and you don’t even realize it.
The major concern with the drug content of our drinking water is that while it’s not as aggressive as sticking a needle in your arm, it is a small dose exposure to drugs you don’t need, drugs you shouldn’t have and drugs that could make you sick over the course of your lifetime. Unknowingly taking all kinds of various prescription and illegal drugs is making us sick and fat. By ingesting another person’s antibiotics over the course of 50 years, it makes it harder for us to stave off infection and it also makes the bugs resistant to a cure.
How is this all possible? Our water supply is recycled and filtered and “made safe” through a three-part process. It is then reused and released back into our water supply for consumption. All of that sounds great, so where’s the problem?
Well, here it is, as each person takes a narcotic, legal or illegal, only a portion of it is absorbed into your body. The rest is passed through you when you urinate or defecate. That waste then passes into the sewers, and goes through the three part filtration system in place to make sure the water is “safe” to drink. That water is combined with rainwater, and gutter water and every other form of H2O that finds its way into our drains. But this three-part filtration system, while removing most harmful waste, does nothing to remove or neutralize the drugs still left behind after the final treatment.
But there is no regulation, oversight or mandatory testing to ensure that the drugs are completely removed from our water. The problem is the only sure-fire way to really guarantee the water is clean and drug free, is to use a reverse-osmosis system. But reverse-osmosis filtration produces 5 times the waste for every gallon of clean water it makes. It is expensive and wasteful.
So, where do we go from here?
