The Drugs We’re Drinking

March 11, 2008 | Category: 荒诞

Money Pills Please excuse this diversion back to the home front:

A new Associated Press revelation that American drinking water contains a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs provides ripe territory for all manner of irresponsible commentary—too ripe, alas, for me to ignore.

For those who haven’t seen the news yet, here’s the gist:

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

According to AP, trace amounts of various drugs were discovered in water supplies located in 24 major cities (serving 41 million people).

The Senate has already latched on to the most obvious inference, i.e., that the nation’s drinking water authorities have, once again, failed to inform the public about a potential danger lurking in its taps (Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, among others, is “alarmed at the news”). And I imagine it won’t be long before others will take up the report to rail against misguided American faith in Pfizer, et al as providers of pill-form health and happiness. But to me, the truly great thing about this report is what it reveals about the drug-taking habits, thus the travails of life, in different parts of the country, Boxer’s home turf in particular.

Some of the results confirm what most of us already expected: bad eating habits in Philadelphia (high cholesterol and heart attack drugs), bi-polar boredom in New Jersey (mood stabilizers), and sacrilege in San Francisco (sex hormones). Others are gloriously counter-intuitive, as with the anxiety medications found in the drinking water of more than 18 million people in Southern California.

Anxiety? California? Impossible, you say. California is sun. California is George Clooney and Arnold Schwartzenneger. California is oiled bodies on the beach, organic produce, rolling with rag-top down. Tanqueray and chronic, sure. Xanax and Klonopin? Surely not.

Well, I just finished a four-year sojourn in California and I feel considerably less anxiety-ridden since leaving. It probably matters that when I left California, I also left graduate school, where severe mental disorders come free with tuition. Yet even before I entered graduate school, I noticed a persistent emotional instability, coincident with a proclivity to self-medication, not just in myself, but amongst many transplant Californians.

I suspect this has largely to do with expectations. I suspect people who move to California do so anticipating that the sun, the proximity to George Clooney and the locally grown tomatoes in their non-farmed fish tacos will somehow melt their worries away, make them laid back, what have you. After they arrive and realize they are not, in fact, feeling so laid back——life can be shitty anywhere, it seems——they nevertheless pretend to be laid back because that is what everyone else is doing. (“Who wants to be the asshole ruining everyone else’s mood?” they ask. “Not me. No no no.”) The pressure mounts. They have no one to talk to, or at least no one who won’t respond with those earnest platitudes about stopping to smell things or getting in touch with oneself that always make it so much worse. So they start talking to themselves instead. Then they turn to drugs to quiet the voices. If they lose perspective, or are incautious, they end up like Heath Ledger.

Of course, this is just a theory, and one with no basis in science whatsoever. And it probably has no bearing on people of naturally sanguine disposition (the real assholes). But if you’re anything like me and you’re contemplating a move to La Jolla or Newport Beach, it might not be a bad idea to hit up your HMO for a benzodiazepine or two beforehand. Or just trade bottled water for tap once you arrive.

[Image courtesy of klynslis]

Tags: anxiety disorder, prescription drugs, Southern California

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About the Author

Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.