It’s hardly news that people use drugs at music festivals, particularly ecstasy. But until recently, the only ones really affected by that drug use, in most cases, was the user. However, according to a newly released study, festival drug consumption could have an untold impact on the surrounding environment.
According to a study published last week in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, these events could be introducing drugs like ecstasy and ketamine into the local water supply, leaving traces of them in rivers and soil, potentially impacting local marine life.
As the Washington Post notes, the study is part of an effort to research so-called emerging contaminants (ECs) or things like drugs (both prescribed and recreational) and hygiene products that end up in waste water. According to the study, only about half to these contaminants are removed during water treatment.
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What this means is that they can eventually end up back in our drinking water as well as our fish. While there’s presumably some level of contaminants in waste water at all times, researchers were particularly interested in how certain events impact the levels.
The researchers looked at how events like football games, holiday weekends, and tourist attractions could cause spikes or changes in the contaminants by measuring contaminant levels in Hengchun, a popular vacation destination in Taiwan and the home of Spring Scream, an annual pop festival.
Despite the low population of the town, researchers weren’t particularly surprised to find that ECs were higher in Hengchun rivers, due to its popularity with tourists. Likewise, EC spikes during popular travel times also didn’t come as a shock, but when Spring Scream descended on Hengchun, things got a little crazy.
According to the report, the festival, which attracts some 60,000 punters, saw an “extraordinary increase (89.1 to 940 ng/L) in the party drug MDMA (ecstasy)” in local water. “The high weekly mass loads of ECs exhibited discharged towards the aquatic ecosystem corresponded to illicit drugs/controlled substances such as ketamine and MDMA,” it added.
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Because of its relatively short duration, researchers could even isolate the average amount of drugs excreted by each attendee. Researchers wrote that “it was suggested that a total of 0.56 mg EC contribution per person was estimated for the youth festival”.
According to the Washington Post, this isn’t the first indication that sewage can be affected by one-off events. Studies of water near universities found spikes in methamphetamine during exam periods and another study found elevated levels of cocaine and ecstasy in the London area on weekends.
But before you go diving into a Hengchun river looking for a buzz, swimming in the water won’t get you high. However, there is a concern that people and animals are being exposed to varying mixtures of different drugs at different concentrations, so it’s hard to pinpoint what the longterm effects might be.
