Air and Water Filters

Drugs Are Not The Only Nasty Thing in Your Tap Water

By Natural Living ⋅  Email ⋅  Print ⋅

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Natural Living RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

According to a recent Associated Press Investigation, residues from pharmaceutical drugs have been found in the tap water of over 41 million Americans across the US. The drugs include sex hormones, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and antibiotics. No tests or studies have been performed to see what even trace amounts of this combination of drugs will do to healthy adults, the elderly, pregnant women, children or infants.

Some people are shocked and horrified at the revelation that our tap water is not fit for consumption while others of us realize that this latest information is merely the tip of the iceberg. This is not the first time that legal or illegal drugs have been found in our drinking water and these drugs could be the very least of our concerns.

The first question that many people ask is “How?”. How do these drugs end up in my water glass? It is simple. Either residues of the drug remain in the person’s urine or they are flushed down the toilet. People are told not to throw away drugs (particularly narcotics) because someone else could take the drugs. Hospitals and nursing homes routinely flush drugs for “safety” reasons, usually under the watchful eye of a superior or two to prevent theft and resale.

Even after the recent press about pharmaceuticals in our drinking water, Medical News Today still makes this statement: “Drugs that should be flushed down the toilet rather than thrown in the trash include narcotic pain medications, such as fentanyl (Actiq, Duragesic Transdermal System, Fentora), oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percocet), meperidine, and morphine (Avinza); the narcolepsy drug sodium oxybate (Xyrem); the hepatitis drug entecavir (Baraclude); the attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder drug methylphenidate (Daytrana Transdermal Patch); and the HIV drugs atazanavir (Reyataz) and stavudine (Zerit).” I guess they figure it would be tragic if one person took the leftover drugs, but perfectly acceptable for the entire population to take them.

Water treatment plants are designed to remove waterborne illnesses and bacteria, not every imaginable contaminant. They treat the water with chemicals that do a great job of providing us water that does not make us sick, but it does a terrible job of removing the cocktail of other chemicals and toxins that are sent down our toilets, drains and rivers every day.

Try to imagine all the items that a typical household flushes and rinses down their drains on any given day. What about the toxins found in household cleaning products that get washed down the drain? A great example is Triclosan, which is found in many anti-bacterial soaps and cleansers, which is devastating to fish and wildlife and actually reacts with the sun to create dioxins once it is out in the atmosphere. It ends up back in your drinking water, on your skin and in your body.

What about the thousands of unregulated cosmetics, personal care, hair care and skin care items that are flushed and rinsed every day? These items contain ingredients that are proven to cause cancer, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, organ system toxicity, allergies, immunotoxicity and much more. The Environmental Working Group’s cosmetics database Skin Deep says “Due to gaping loopholes in federal law, companies can put virtually any ingredient into personal care products. Even worse, the government does not require pre-market safety tests for any of them.” People are rinsing this stuff down their shower drains every day. Some get filtered out of the resulting tap water, some do not.

But wait, there’s more! What about water pollution from pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, sediment and disease causing micro-organisms from modern agriculture and factory farming? In 2005 the EWG published a study that found 83 agriculture pollutants were contaminating the water of over 200 million Americans, and here is the scary part….54 of those 83 chemicals are not regulated by the EPA meaning they do not have any legal, health based limit. Your water could contain none, a little or a lot. It does not matter to the regulators.

There are more pollutants in our drinking water from industrial, wastewater and stormwater runoff. What does that mean? It means that plasticizers, solvents and propellants, most of which have never been tested for their effects on human health, have made their way into your tap water via auto emissions, industrial waste into rivers and streams, lawn pollutants, road surfaces and from the wastewater treatment plants “that dump effluent into waterways at a rate of 60 gallons per person, every day.”(1)

Lastly, there is the water treatment plants themselves which disinfect our tap water with still more chemicals. While all Americans are grateful to have water free from many water borne diseases that plague third world countries, most do not realize the price we pay for that “clean” water. Water treatment plants deluge us with still more chemicals that are untested and unregulated. These chemicals (over 600 identified) increase cancer, developmental and reproductive toxicity risks further.

Some chemicals, like chlorine, have proven health risks such as destroying the probiotics living in your intestines that are necessary for optimal health. There are many other adverse health effects from drinking chlorine (and bathing in it). The icing on the cake is that most water treatment plants add fluoride to the drinking water which is nearly impossible to remove from your water (without reverse osmosis) and from your body. The fluoride that is added is a nasty industrial by-product, not a pharmaceutical grade product, which does absolutely no good when ingested (it has to be applied topically to the teeth), it has tremendous health ramifications and it is a basic human rights violation to drug people without their consent.

As far as the drugs in the water go, naturally we recommend that people should take fewer pills to begin with. Visit Natural News or Dr. Mercola for tons of great information on the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs. They are simply unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. If you do have leftover pills to dispose of, then don’t flush them but mix them with cat litter or coffee grounds and throw them away. Here is another drug disposal solution that I found at The Big Green Purse:

“It is worth noting that, despite the AP report, pharmaceuticals have been showing up in drinking water for at least 20 years. It is time to upgrade municipal water systems to protect people from the onslaught of chemicals they may be unwittingly ingesting every day. It is also imperative to launch a national “give back” campaign to get citizens to return unused drugs to their point of purchase. Alternatively, cities could mount a “pharmaceutical pick-up” the way many of them now sponsor an annual hazardous waste pick-up.”

Many people are already aware of some or all of the contaminants that are currently finding their way into our drinking water. That is why the bottled water phenomenon has exploded, because people are trying to protect themselves from the “unknown” in their tap water. Unfortunately this is only making matters worse. 25-40% of the time, bottled water is merely tap water in disguise. To make matters worse, drinking bottled water comes with severe environmental repercussions.

If bottled water is not the solution, what is? Unfortunately, our entire water infrastructure needs a complete overhaul and I am not banking on that happening to my satisfaction in my lifetime. The solution more likely lies with individuals and corporations who take matters in their own hands to both conserve water in the first place and obtain their own water through reclamation, rainwater collection and personal wells.

If you need to carry water with you, use aluminum or stainless steel reusable containers. If you can afford it, opt for a reverse osmosis system that will reduce or eliminate most contaminants. You can purchase a whole house reverse osmosis system for roughly $1,000, countertop units for under $600 or under the sink units for around $200. If that is too pricey or you rent, then take a trip to your grocery store with your refillable water containers. Many grocery stores now have reverse osmosis water dispensers that sell water for under .50 cents/gallon. (Make sure it is reverse osmosis and not thinly disguised tap). You cannot shower in it, but you can have some peace of mind knowing that you are not drinking extra industrial, agricultural, and household chemicals with your water.

Check out the quality of your tap water:
Check out the quality of your bottled water:

1. A National Assessment of Tap Water Quality, Environmental Working Group
December 20, 2005

Tags for this post