Wastewater analysis and drug consumption. Useful assessment tool

Drug use in Europe is now more than ever a multifaceted issue involving a broad and ever-changing range of substances. Alarmingly, recent European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) reports show that roughly 83 million adults aged between 15 and 64 years in the European Union have used illicit substances at least once in their lifetime. Polydrug use is rife, and consumption patterns range from experimental/occasional, habitual use all the way to addiction. Traditional epidemiological methods delineating drug abuse specifics (i.e. number of users, age groups, specific characteristics and patterns of use) are questionnaire-based and therefore present the classic biases linked to the selected sample, thus risking an underestimation of the phenomenon. The Mario Negri IRCCS Pharmacological Research Institute has developed a new population screening method based on wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) which makes it possible to detect drug metabolites in waste water and to estimate which and how many substances are consumed by the entire population belonging to the wastewater treatment plant being monitored. Such a technique has gained great interest at the national and international level, and may be especially valuable as a detection/monitoring tool at a time when novel psychoactive substances have come to trigger a major public health crisis, on account of their elusiveness and potential as substitutes/adulterants of traditional substances of abuse.