Chinese officers destroy seized drugs. Image Credit: Xinhua News Agency/Shutterstock

Dozens of cities across China are applying an unusual forensic technique to monitor illegal drug use: chemically analysing sewage for traces of drugs, or their telltale metabolites, excreted in urine.

One southern city, Zhongshan, a drug hotspot, is also monitoring waste water to evaluate the effectiveness of its drug-reduction programmes, says Li Xiqing, an environmental chemist at Peking University in Beijing who is working with police in these cities.

Li says Zhongshan police have already used the technique to help track down and arrest a drug manufacturer. He says a handful of cities are planning to use data from waste water to set targets for police arrests of drug users, some as early as next year.

Although illegal drug use has been monitored through wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) in other countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, most studies have collected data for epidemiological research rather than for setting policies. “The noteworthy part is that China seems to be actually acting on the technique,” says Daniel Burgard, a chemist at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

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