Innovative Way to Calculate Cocaine Users
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) commissioned county workers from Fairfax County to collect sewage water earlier this month. The purpose? To test the water for levels of a urinary waste product of cocaine, benzoylecgonine. By testing the levels, they hope to be able to extrapolate the amount of cocaine used in the area, and from there the number of cocaine users. The ONDCP hopes that this will provide more accurate numbers than surveys, which rely on the honesty of participants. The same method was used last year in Italy, and implied about twice as many users as had been previously thought.
Comments
To underscore the underreporting, or more precisely, underestimation..
In London the cocaine use is "15 times more than the official figure given by the Home Office."
"German government and the EU assume that about 400,000 people in Germany use cocaine at least once a year. Based on the river data, this would mean that each one of them would have to sniff the highly unlikely number of 16 lines, or portions, of the drug each day.".
Posted by: daksya | March 27, 2006 03:50 PM