So how many drugs are the people who consume the crops now ingesting because of this I wonder ?
> Many people are, however, concerned about pharmaceutical content in the urine. "It's the biggest question we get," Shupack says. REI has conducted research to find out just how much of common drugs like caffeine and the painkiller acetaminophen are evident in vegetables grown using urine fertiliser. The final results are yet to be released, but the preliminary findings suggest the amount of pharmaceuticals in vegetables fertilised with urine to be "extremely small". "You'd have to eat a pretty obscene amount of lettuce, every day, for way longer than you can live" to get a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine, Shupack says.
This is study is European, but still shows the issue:
https://www.euda.europa.eu/news/2024/4/latest-wastewater-dat...
At the nanogram level? Forget it. There's all kinds of crap in everything we eat, drink, and breathe. Dose makes the poison - there's a big difference between a detectable level of something and a clinically significant amount. You'd be better off improving the ventilation in your house than worrying about whether your lettuce has 1PPT of cocaine metabolite in it.
Note that all of the above is about the party drugs. I have no idea about what the deal is with the psychiatric meds and hormones. If anyone has knowledge of whether chronic exposure to extremely small quantities of them and their métabolites has clinical significance I'd be interested to know more. I sort of doubt it, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong