Fairfax county, Virginia recently agreed to participate in a White House pilot program to search for the byproducts of cocaine usage in community sewage. Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly called the request "very strange" and said "We're ready to do anything and everything we can do to eliminate illicit drug use. But I'd want to know a lot more about what this will actually lead to."

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy claims it isn't interested in localizing cocaine usage, but rather it is interested in researching consumption. The hope is that the testing will provide a more accurate index of cocaine usage than surveys. The government is looking for benzoylecgonine, the primary byproduct of cocaine metabolization, in wastewater.

Testing the waters for benzoylecgonine is not a new idea. In 2005, Italian researchers tested samples from the Po river and estimated that around 4kg-- 27 doses per thousand adults-- of cocaine was used daily by the communities in the area, nearly 3 times the usage described by previous estimates. Earlier this year, the Swiss ski town of Saint-Moritz performed similar testing.

If you're concerned about the privacy of your pee, you could always consider a septic tank or, more cheaply, the bushes.

---Nick

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