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?

Well, that guy in my life was Luke. Luke and I were friends for quite a while, and while everything between us was excellent, he had the most disgusting habit. He would throw anything and everything into the gutter with a smirk and a “That’s where that goes.”

That was how Luke lived his life, “That’s where that goes.” Every cigarette butt, every candy wrapper, every paper coffee cup, thrown carelessly into the gutter, followed by a “That’s where that goes.” Well, one night, we were at a bar and it was raining. Luke and I were outside. Luke was smoking and as per usual, he tossed his cigarette carelessly away.

I watched as his butt landed in the river of rainwater and was swept along into the gutter, where it vanished. Luke looked at me and said “That’s where that goes.” And I don’t know if it was the booze that created my sudden intolerance of his behavior or if it was the rain, but I turned to Luke and explained where the sewer leads. It leads to our water supply. What we drink, cook with, shower in. It’s all the same water. He looked at me like I was nuts… “Water goes into the sewer and is treated at some plant and it’s purified or filtered or whatever. We’re not drinking sewer water.”

That was where Luke was wrong. In fact the sewer water is the same water we drink fresh from the tap. I know. It’s gross and icky and scary.  And it’s not just filled with mountains of Luke’s used cigarette butts, coffee cups, and candy wrappers, but it is in fact filled with our entire city’s trash. Everything that is flushed, tossed or dumped finds it way into our water supply.

And even with the most stringent of filtration rules, the job is just not getting completely done…