Mapping the Changes in Europe's Drug Use

If you want to find out which drugs European city-dwellers are consuming, look in the sewers. That’s the premise of a study released this week by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which uses wastewater analysis to create a continent-wide map of drug use.

This method of testing may seem somewhat nauseating—it’s essentially a form of city-wide urine analysis—but the speed of this method enables drug agencies to get a far more up-to-date picture than perhaps anything else. The broadest of its kind yet (having expanded this year to cover 60 cities), the EMCDDA’s report is so far the only pan-European study whose results were released in the same year as the survey was initiated. The results reveal some significant trends for four drugs—cocaine, amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine. These are the three most significant: