Now that the Associated Press has published a short article disclosing the presence in drinking water of all kinds of pharmaceuticals, ranging from antibiotics and anti-convulsants to mood stabilizers and sex hormones, the officials are reacting rather predictably: EPA's head of water safety is mumbling, "’We recognize it is a growing concern and we’re taking it very seriously"; but the real winner is from Tom Curtis, deputy executive director of the The American Water Works Association, who claims, "[The public] doesn’t know how to interpret the information” from tests for water pollutants. His assertion rests on the matter of the extent to which modern testing methods can detect very low concentrations—in parts per billion—of contaminants; but his assertion also ignores the lack of large-scale, conclusive studies on long-term—indeed, life-spanning—effects on biological systems of very low-level consumption of these contaminants. As an alternative to simply dismissing public concerns about these trace amounts of medications showing up in the water people drink every day, it would be best to take the cautionary approach of the doctor quoted in the original AP article, who said, "That can't be good."

At the same time, however, pointing the finger of blame at the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Water Works Association, municipal water treatment facilities, or even the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs showing up in tap water is an exercise in misplaced responsibility. The principle reason meds are floating in the water is none other than modern American culture and its utter obsession with what has been rather prejudicially described by this editorialist as the Church of Medicine.

Eating what is quite literally a pharmaceutical dosage load in the hundreds of billions of pills every year, and being utterly convinced that there is no way to reject these prescriptions, the American public is pumping through its collective body phenomenal amounts of chemicals that then get expelled through urine and feces; then, for some inexplicable reason, those very same Americans comprising that worried public get all kinds of excited because their bodies are doing exactly what bodies do: they expel waste, toxins, and all other manner of things they do not need or are finished using.

And then, for some even more inexplicable reason, that same American public wants the government to make this consequence of the national obsession with the pill-driven lifestyle of modernity go away. Instead of pointing the finger at the source of the pollution, which is people who just cannot turn down the prospect of pain-free, mentally "stable" near-immortality, that American public wants action to clean up the water.

Funny thing about water, though. If we look into a pool of it, we're probably going to see our own reflection.

Perhaps the EPA can do something about that problem, too.


The Dark Wraith, for his own part, will be using distilled water.