Festival Goers Did So Many Drugs That Their Pee Harmed Local Fish

The 2019 Glastonbury music pageant experienced an alarming influence on neighborhood waterways.

MDMEels

Attendees at the 2019 Glastonbury new music festival should have collectively taken an unfathomable volume of party medicines — simply because when scientists analyzed drinking water from the close by River Whitelake, they identified substantial adequate concentrations of MDMA and cocaine to damage community wildlife.

In the months subsequent the competition, scientists found 104 moments additional MDMA downstream from the site than upstream of it, according to investigation released earlier this month in the journal Environmental Exploration. That, the Bangor University scientists informed The Guardian, is superior more than enough to harm the area population of European eels, which are a uncommon and safeguarded species. They also located 40 times more cocaine downstream than up, but thankfully that was not more than enough to endanger the eels.

PeeSA

Just for superior evaluate, the researchers also drug tested a close by river, Redlake, that doesn’t cross in which the festival was held. They didn’t discover any elevated drug amounts in the drinking water of that river, suggesting that the drug contamination did, in point, come from festival-goers seeking relief.

Apparently this is a well-regarded difficulty at Glastonbury, as the pageant organizers instructed The Guardian that they experienced previously enacted — and observed “measurable success” with their so-identified as “Don’t Pee on the Land” campaign.

“Peeing on the land at Glastonbury leads to pollution of the water desk, which can affect local wildlife and fish,” pageant organizers tweeted in June 2019, prior to the festival. “The Ecosystem Company have the electrical power to close the site if there is much too a great deal air pollution. Please only pee in the hundreds of bogs and urinals on site.”

Regrettably, nature ought to have called for also a lot of festivalgoers, and these warnings went ignored. The substantial inflow of medicine into the river is an yearly incident relatively than an everyday prevalence. But examine coauthor Christian Dunn drew a parallel to the a lot far more prevalent issue of pharmaceutical squander, which he explained to The Guardian is “a concealed, worryingly understudied nevertheless possibly devastating pollutant.”

Read through A lot more: Glastonbury: drug traces from on-site urination could hurt exceptional eels [The Guardian]

More on drinking water pollution: Researchers Are Doing work to Remove Anxiety Medicine From Water

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