Sign of the Thames

I'm clearing out the old links I've been holding and this was interesting. The Sunday Telegraph discovered that cocaine use in the UK is grossly underestimated. Using statistics complied from the water in the Thames River, they estimate Londoners snort more than 150,000 lines of the class A drug every day.

An investigation by the Sunday Telegraph found that, after cocaine had passed through users' bodies and sewage treatment plants, an estimated 2kg - 80,000 lines - of the drug went into the river each day.

...The Thames investigation, the first of its kind in Britain, was conducted by scientists using the latest technology. It is regarded as the most accurate large-scale drug-detection method available.

Meanwhile, our US drug czar insists cocaine availability in the US is falling. If that's at all true - which I doubt in light of this underestimation - it would probably account for the rise in meth consumption here.