Don’t Drink the Water

What happens to those leftover anti-anxiety pills J flushes down the toilet? It ends up in the drinking water, of course.
A vast array of pharmaceuticals _ including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones _ have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

_Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

_Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

_Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

_A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

_The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

We know we are being exposed to other people’s drugs through our drinking water, and that can’t be good,” says Dr. David Carpenter, who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment of the State University of New York at Albany.

The State Of . . . our weekly environmental scare. There was no evidence that Chicago’s drinking water had any of that stuff in it. Why? Because Chicago was not tested. Now that we know this, what do we do next? Switch to bottled water? Apparently, that ain’t safe either.