It's official: Brits spend too much time in toilet cubicles, snorting coke and then pissing it back into the water supply. A study conducted by the drug policy think tank Transform has revealed that the authorities are losing the war on drugs – to the point where the Class A substance is contaminating our drinking water.
"We have the near highest level of cocaine use in western Europe," a spokesperson from Transform told the Sunday Times. "It has also been getting cheaper and cheaper at the same time as its use has been going up."
Benzoylecgonine, the metabolised version of the drug detected by drug testing, was found in four sample sites by the Drinking Water Inspectorate.
But if anyone's thinking about drinking out of the Thames this weekend in the hope of catching a buzz, don't bother. The amount of benzoylecgonine in our drinking water is at least thousands of times below the dose seen to affect animals, and hundreds of thousands of times below the levels needed to affect humans.
In 2011, police drug experts revealed that 11% of all UK banknotes tested positive for traces of cocaine.
According to the charity DrugScope, there are 180,000 dependent users of crack cocaine in the UK. Around 700,000 people between the ages of 16 and 59 take drugs ever year.
