How Much Cocaine Is In Nantucket's Sewage? The Town Is About To Find Out
Jason Graziadei •
How much cocaine is in Nantucket’s sewage? And what about fentanyl and other opiates?
The town is about to find out. Nantucket’s Health Department will soon begin testing the island’s sewage for a range of hard drugs to establish a baseline that will help health leaders better understand trends in Nantucket’s use of illicit substances. The data could also be used as a tool to anticipate when outreach and intervention become more important for substance abuse prevention organizations and medical providers.
“First, this is baselining - If we can get an idea of the standard usage of drugs, we can see if interventions and behaviors change the rate of consumption,” said Jerico Mele, the town’s human services director. “That can give us a scorecard on the efforts and reducing usage. With opiate data, we can confirm our expectations about usage going up around certain times of year, like holidays, or if there are time periods when drug use is heavy. We can then communicate to treatment centers to reach out to patients and increase outreach. It’s a tool for communicating public safety, to be aware and be expecting.”
Nantucket continues to test sewage at the Surfside Wastewater Treatment Facility for COVID-19 with funding from a state program. The drug-testing of sewage will piggyback on that already-established program, Nantucket Sewer Department head David Gray said.
Every week, the town sends two samples of sewage off-island to a company called Biobot, which tests them for COVID-19. That program has been underway since the early days of the pandemic. Those same samples will now be tested for the presence of hard drugs, including cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine, nicotine, and opiates, along with common diseases such as influenza and RSV.
“They can use the same samples we take,” Gray said. “The numbers will be interesting. They want to get a baseline, and that’s the reason we test for COVID. It’s going to be data that is a great forecasting tool.”
Since the samples are already going out every week to Biobot, the drug testing is expected to start this month. Mele said he does not anticipate the town will be posting the results publicly, however, as the data will be used for internal analysis and outreach to community partners and stakeholders.
“Everyone’s got a good idea of what the situation is, but we have very little direct measurement,” Mele said. “When we get away from our gut to getting data, we get a better picture of what’s going on.”