Shrimp in England’s Rural Rivers Are Laced With Cocaine

A new study also detected low levels of dozens of pharmaceuticals and pesticides in shrimp from the county of Suffolk


By Brigit Katz
smithsonian.com
May 7, 2019
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From Ontario, Canada to London, England, traces of illegal drugs have been found in drinking water supplies. But United Kingdom researchers were nevertheless surprised to find low levels of cocaine—along with traces of dozens of pharmaceuticals and pesticides—in shrimp from 15 sites in Suffolk, a county to the northeast of England’s capital.

“We see this often in major cities around Europe, and we do yearly monitoring on surface water levels,” Thomas Miller, a postdoctoral research associate at King’s College London and first author of a new study in Environment International, tells Smithsonian. “However, for Suffolk, a much more rural area that has a lot of agricultural land use, we were not expecting to see cocaine in every sample.”

Scientists have long been conducting research into the contaminants that permeate aquatic ecosystems. Most previous investigations have focused on levels of pollutants in the water, since it has been difficult to quantitatively measure trace contaminants in aquatic organisms themselves. But this is “a limitation,” Miller says, because if these pollutants are causing harm to wildlife, the damage will be coming from internalized chemicals. Fortunately, modern instruments have become more sensitive in recent years, making it possible for the study authors to measure contaminant levels in both surface waters and in Gammarus pulex, a freshwater crustacean.

In total, the researchers were able to detect 56 compounds from illegal drugs, pharmaceuticals and pesticides in the little critters. Cocaine was the most frequent contaminant found; it showed up in shrimp at every single site. Lidocaine, a local anaesthetic that is sometimes used to dilute cocaine, was the second most frequently detected compound. The drug ketamine was also widespread. Diazepam (also known as Valium) and alprazolam (also known as Xanax) were among the other drugs detected, as NPR’s Merrit Kennedy reports.

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