Atmospheric pollution is a
hot topic as the arctic ice melts and politicians fail to agree, but we all
experience it personally as we breath and sneeze our way through the day. I
hear more and more complaints about allergies these days. The issue of
secondhand smoking has produced smoking bans in public places in many
countries.
The
latest problem of unintentional ingestion has been highlighted by Cecinato et
al of the National Research Council of Italy and is published in the current
issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment (1), and was highlighted
in yesterday’s Annals of Improbable research (2). It addresses the issue of the
good citizens of Italy involuntary ingestion of psychotropic substances –
unknowingly, of course.
The authors track the
levels of atmospheric cocaine and cannabinoids from the cannabis smokers and
compare it to dire situations such as the variation in the levels of crime.
It seems that the more
atmospheric cocaine that is drifting around in the atmosphere to be sniffed up
willy-nilly by the average citizen, the more drugs are seized, the more demands
for clinical treatment are made, and the higher the number of drug related crimes. These
may seem understandable but not necessarily causally related. However, the
levels also correlate with tumor insurgence and that is quite a bit more scary.
As the cannabinoid level
floating about increases locally, so does the level of mental illness. Another
scary statistic that needs the causal relationship to be established, otherwise
these reports are reminiscent of the US scare information disseminated in the ’30’s
when the crackdown on psychotropic drugs came in hard following prohibition of
alcohol.
- A. Cecinato et al, Science of the Total Environment, 412, 87, (2011)
- http://www.improbable.com/
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