Anyone who has ever been to a music festival has probably wondered if such a large concentration of drugs will have an affect on the environment. If you're ever been off-your-tree high at a music festival, you've probably worried about this rather a lot. Kids do drugs, they piss them out, and then their ecstasy-laden urine works its way into our streams, rivers, and oceans. Being the only THUMP staffer to have studied microbiology and cellular physiology, the task was given to me to crunch the numbers and find out.
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In the scentific world, we do things like "assume a cow is a sphere" in order to make approximate hypotheses. In the case of fish getting high off your own supply, things are no different. Our assumptions are:1. That fish can metabolize drugs like MDMA, ketamine, and cocaine.
Since these drugs act on conserved regions of the brain and fish have brains, this isn't much of a leap. We know from nature that many animals can and do get high. We also know from lab testing that animals like mice and chimpanzees respond to dopamine stimulation.2.That microorganisms cannot metabolize drugs like MDMA, ketamine, and cocaine.
Again, this isn't a huge logical jump. Since organisms like phytoplankton don't have brains, the only impact that drugs will have with be the result of changes to water acidity (pH).3.That fish metabolize drugs with the same efficiency as humans.
In reality, fish have more efficient kidneys and can clear foreign molecules through their systems much more quickly than we can. Assuming human-like efficiency allows us to predict a worst case scenario.4.That a drug's dosage is proportional to an animal's weight.
If you've ever wondered why your little blonde friend only needs half a cap of MDMA to be rolling off her tree, it has a lot to do with her size. There's a give and take for variables like water weight, fat content, tolerance, and setting, so for the purpose of our calculations we'll use average human doses.
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If those assumptions are agreeable, let's move on.
Human Doses and Fish Doses
Like most drugs, dosing of MDMA and Ketamine is dependent on the user's body weight. To obtain optimal effects, men and women are advised to take 1.5mg of MDMA per kilogram of body weight; with orally-ingested Ketamine, that number is between 1.6mg to 4mg per kilogram of body weight.If we apply these values to fish, we get the following values:
- a 10 gram fish would need 0.015mg of MDMA or 0.016-0.04mg of Ketamine
- a 100 gram fish would need 0.15mg of MDMA or 0.16-0.4mg of Ketamine
- a 1kg fish would need 1.5 mg of MDMA or 1.6-4.0mg of Ketamine
- a 10kg fish would need 15mg of MDMA or 16-40mg of KetamineHowNow, we need some data and as luck would have it we have just that.
Ars Technica reported earlier this week about a 2011 American Chemical Society study, Impacts of Emerging Contaminants on Surrounding Aquatic Environment from a Youth Festival, in Taiwan. There, a 600,000-person music festival resulted in dramatically increased concentrations of MDMA, ketamie, caffeine, pseudophedrine (Sudafed), and acetaminophen (Aspirin).The study's contributor's detected the following peak concentrations: 900 nanograms of MDMA per litre, 14000 nanograms of caffeine per litre, 90,000 nanograms of ketamine per litre, and 5000 nanograms of acetaminophen per litre. Since caffeine and acetaminophen aren't mind-altering substances, what we're interested in are the values for MDMA and ketamine.
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How muAt this point, we're going to have to do something you're not going to like. It's called "math" and don't worry, it's friendly. To help you all visualise it, here's the calculation we're going to be doing based on our four assumptions.According to their calculations the fish will be receiving 0.014% the typical dose of MDMA (100mg) in each litre of water. If we approximate that the average human weighs 80kg and the average fish in that river weighs 1kg, we can calculate that they need 1.25% of the dose to feel the same relative effect. (Larger fish will need a higher dose while smaller fish will need a lower dose.)This means that for every 100 litres of water that a fish passes through its body, it will ingest one relative dose. Is this a lot? Is this a little? Again, it depends on the fish. Saltwater fish actively drink water and will ingest far greater amounts, while freshwater fish (the subjects of this study) absorb water through their skin in an osmotic process. Their kidneys are very efficient and produce very dilute urine, which suggests that they would be more effective at metabolising drugs and getting them out of their systems.I can continue if you think this is worth the read, haha. The tl:dr is that yes, drug concentrations spike, but its effect will primarily be on micro-organisms and a three day spike won't be enough to do lasting damage.
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Ars Technica reported earlier this week about a 2011 American Chemical Society study, Impacts of Emerging Contaminants on Surrounding Aquatic Environment from a Youth Festival, in Taiwan. There, a 600,000-person music festival resulted in dramatically increased concentrations of MDMA, ketamie, caffeine, pseudophedrine (Sudafed), and acetaminophen (Aspirin).The study's contributor's detected the following peak concentrations: 900 nanograms of MDMA per litre, 14000 nanograms of caffeine per litre, 90,000 nanograms of ketamine per litre, and 5000 nanograms of acetaminophen per litre. Since caffeine and acetaminophen aren't mind-altering substances, what we're interested in are the values for MDMA and ketamine.How muAt this point, we're going to have to do something you're not going to like. It's called "math" and don't worry, it's friendly. To help you all visualise it, here's the calculation we're going to be doing based on our four assumptions.According to their calculations the fish will be receiving 0.014% the typical dose of MDMA (100mg) in each litre of water. If we approximate that the average human weighs 80kg and the average fish in that river weighs 1kg, we can calculate that they need 1.25% of the dose to feel the same relative effect. (Larger fish will need a higher dose while smaller fish will need a lower dose.)This means that for every 100 litres of water that a fish passes through its body, it will ingest one relative dose. Is this a lot? Is this a little? Again, it depends on the fish. Saltwater fish actively drink water and will ingest far greater amounts, while freshwater fish (the subjects of this study) absorb water through their skin in an osmotic process. Their kidneys are very efficient and produce very dilute urine, which suggests that they would be more effective at metabolising drugs and getting them out of their systems.I can continue if you think this is worth the read, haha. The tl:dr is that yes, drug concentrations spike, but its effect will primarily be on micro-organisms and a three day spike won't be enough to do lasting damage.
