Rainfall runoff from landills — known as leachate — eventually ends up in aquifers and rivers and brings a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs with it. Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman Flickr photostream.
It is ironic, that the government and an ever decreasing amount of its supporters, get all ballistic over recreational drugs that people decide and choose to consume but shrug their shoulders over pharmaceutical drugs in everyone’s drinking water. It is just no big deal to them. Clarke Canfield writes in this Associated Press story,
The federal government advises throwing most unused or expired medications into the trash instead of down the drain, but they can end up in the water anyway, a study from Maine suggests.
Tiny amounts of discarded drugs have been found in water at three landfills in the state, confirming suspicions that pharmaceuticals thrown into household trash are ending up in water that drains through waste, according to a survey by the state’s environmental agency that’s one of only a handful to have looked at the presence of drugs in landfills.
That landfill water — known as leachate — eventually ends up in rivers. Most of Maine doesn’t draw its drinking water from rivers where the leachate ends up, but in other states that do, water supplies that come from rivers could potentially be contaminated.
The results of the survey are being made known as lawmakers in Maine consider a bill, among the first of its kind in the nation, that would require drug manufacturers to develop and pay for a program to collect unused prescription and over-the-counter drugs from residents and dispose of them.
Click to read the complete Associated Press story. For a related story from two years ago, click HERE. This is old news though, they have known about drugs in our drinking water for years…
Hydroponics Dictionary
