Assessing illicit drugs in wastewater.

This report presents a number of contributions that relate to analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community. This area of work is developing in a multidisciplinary fashion, involving scientists working in different research areas. For this reason, the contributions to this publication come from a variety of different perspectives including: analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology. Table of contents • Introduction to sewage epidemiology • Estimating community drug use • Drug metabolism • On the occurrence and fate of illicit substances in sewer systems • Georeferenced wastewater sampling and applied spatial statistics • Integrating wastewater analysis with conventional approaches to measuring drug use • Overall conclusion