A remarkably underreported story here in the US, and indeed in most advanced economies, is the increasing presence of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.  No, this is not some grand conspiracy to dumb us down or make us passive (please remove the tinfoil helmet’s, y’all) . . . it’s what happens when we overprescribe drugs in dosages larger than can be completely taken up by our bodies.  These drugs are expelled in our waste, and enter the surrounding ecosystem.  This scares the hell out of me, and is almost enough to make me buy bottled water . . . and then I remember that bottled water is likely coming from a similarly contaminated source and has all sorts of horrific impacts on the environment.
NPR is running another story that references this issue today – a story about shrimp on measurable amounts of Prozac (which they are taking up from their surrounding environments).  The story focuses on the impact of the Prozac on the shrimp, which head for light and therefore become more vulnerable to predators.  What I find boggling is that the story stops there.
There is a huge implication here – WE EAT THOSE SHRIMP.  And chemicals like fluoxetine concentrate as they move up the food chain – which means that when we eat shrimp on miniscule amounts of Prozac, we are dosing ourselves with Prozac.  Eat enough shrimp, and you can get a dose that actually affects you.  And this is not the only edible animal or plant taking up pharmaceutical chemicals from the environment – lots of them do.  Just as mercury becomes a problem as it moves up the food chain, so too these chemicals become a problem – we are approaching a situation where it will be difficult to eat without getting an unprescribed dose of pharmaceutical.  This cannot be good for us.
And people wonder why puberty is coming earlier and earlier for girls in our society.  There is a reason my daughter drinks organic milk . . .
The point here is that the environment is not a bottomless sink into which we can dump things like chemicals and expect that we will never see them again.  Yes, most people know this – yet we, as a society, seem surprised every time a new type of chemical surfaces in our food or water.  We spend a lot of time and energy hollering about things like deforestation in the developing world, while we chew up our own environment in much more subtle ways that might be much more difficult to reverse . . . perhaps we need to get our own house in order before commenting on the behavior of others.