For better or worse, there is no point in denying that some of the revellers at this weekend’s Electric Picnic festival will be experiencing the event whilst in the chemically-induced state. Taking drugs at a music festival is, for some, par for the course, and nothing to bat an eyelid over a grossly dilated pupil over.
But have you ever stopped to wonder where all those drugs and chemicals wash away to once high-flying attendees manage to make it to the on-site facilities?
From waste water to sewage plants, and on to the local ecosystem, there’s growing concern that the aquatic life near to sites playing host to large-scale festivals are increasingly bearing the brunt of our narcotic excesses. And man, if that come down isn’t rough.
In 2014, health officials in the Hengchun, a township of 60,000 at the most Southern point of Taiwan, investigated the effects of the sudden arrival of 600,000 revellers at ‘Spring Scream’, an annual music festival held there. Taking water samples, the local ecosystem showed a huge, for want of a better word, spike in the levels of ecstasy and Ketamine, two party drugs extremely popular in Asian – and indeed Irish – raves and nightclubs.
Daily readings of the local water supply revealed it had become laced with trace levels of a number of party drugs, hoarded and ingested by festival attendees.
“With respect to the tourist impacts, the most interesting finding was the extraordinary increase (89.1 to 940 ng/L) in the party drug MDMA (ecstacy) during the youth festival,” researchers wrote. Or as DeathAndTaxes more succinctly put it, "It's K-Pop and K-Holes all week long."
[D&T]
The only solace the environmental scientists can take from the whole affair, assuming that they weren't popping Valium to calm their anxious reactions, is that the levels of over-the-counter medicines, like Ibuprofen, found in the water remains consistent before, during, and after the highs of 'Summer Spring' had become emotionally-fragile lows.
‘Emerging contaminants’ is the name the scientists have given to this new phenomenon of chemical pollutants making their way into our waterways. Recent studies claim that only about half of the legal and illegal substances in sewage are purged before it makes its way back into the ecosystem, exposing everyone and everything in its vicinity to unknown dangers. In brief, if you think fluoride is a problem, when you start grinding your teeth while off your face on trace amounts of MDMA, it might be the only thing saving you from the dentist.
And it is a great unknown, as the outcome all these drugs will have on the environment is based on research in its infancy. We have no way of knowing how this will affect the health of either aquatic or terrestrial life, though based on the scant observations made so far, it doesn't look promising.
The reality is that lifeforms of different sizes metabolise organic and chemical substances in different ways, meaning the way exposure to antidepressants affects minnows (males become more aggressive, females produce fewer eggs), might have very little correlation to how sipping Prozac-laced water mint tea will affect human beings.
But taking on board what science can reliably tell us, a 2013 review study by Australian researchers rounded up the affects of various drugs on different marine lifeforms, and its sobering reading; zebra fish exposed to cocaine develop physical defects, coke-up mollusks don't fair much better, and fish and mussels exposed to morphine see their immune systems weaken and their metabolism slow down.
The real problem with this psychotropic slurry is that the world's population is growing, and moving more and more to urbanised areas, putting ever more pressure on the waterways around the world's megacities to maintain a comfortable life style. This means the emerging contaminants in our water by 2050, when 70% of the world's population are expected to live in urban area, could be a real downer – in more sense than one.
