>high enough oxycodone levels for the shellfish to test positive
That doesn't really tell me anything. Are they testing by taste or by some fancy test that can detect down to 1 ppq?
That doesn't really tell me anything. Are they testing by taste or by some fancy test that can detect down to 1 ppq?
Assume 1 ppq detection rates (like many spectroscopic methods claim to do).
Puget sound is 110 km^3 or 1.10E14 liters of water. That's 6.05E15 moles of water. At one ppq (1E15), you need 6.05 moles of heroin. This comes out to about 2.2 kilograms.
Now in terms of doses, that's a lot of doses. But that's not a lot if a drug runner could have just tossed a single brick in to reach that concentration (or emptied a single car boot in haste).
If a person puts a gram of 100% pure heroin (another good question might be how purity affects the measurements) in to their body, how much will come out the other end?
Also, from a chemistry perspective, how does water bring a solvent affect opioid molecules existing? Would the water or various things in the water break down the molecules into other non detectable molecules?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wim_Van_den_Brink/publi...
However, it is not clear if the glucuronides would be picked up by the test. Morphine glucuronides -- particularly morphine-3-glucuronide -- can hydrolyse back to morphine. It seems that the morphine molecule is largely not destroyed metabolically; the glucuronide moiety is more like a molecular "tag" that tells the kidney to get rid of something.
Probably the molecule does break up with a certain half life, either due to sun, or other animals metabolising it, etc. Then that 2.2 kg brick needs to be replaced once every two half-lives.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991390/ Gives really hand-wavy half-life of many drugs in the environment as about 500 days, so the brick needs to be replaced every 1000 days.
Also 1 ppq is the lower bound. I think 1 ppt is quite reasonable for many methods though, so that can multiply the limit by 1000x.
All the factors above can increase the threshold amount of opoids, but here are some factors that can decrease it substantially:
There are people who dump unused drugs in, so that needs no attenuation factor.
Also, mussels are filter feeders, and oxycodone might accumulate in them substantially more (like 1000x+) than the background.
Finally, where they collected the mussels is probably correlated with sewage drains due to ease of human access, so the effective "volume of distribution" can be way less than the 110 km^3.
All that is to say, the real statistics are in the overdose calls for opoids. The headline is still an interesting cocktail-party line, but probably should be taken as a statement just by itself.
Does this mean mussels are not a good food source to begin with? Is it better to avoid them, regardless of origin?
Assume highest street prices.
It's kind of like saying "Water tests positive for arsenic!", then finding it's 5 ppb and the EPA limit for drinking water is 10 ppb.