Statistics Canada wants to know: what's in your pee?
The national agency is trying to get a better picture of how people in Canada use recreational drugs, just months before recreational cannabis is expected to be legalized nationwide. The study is currently in a pilot-project phase, focussing just on Montreal and five other cities.
Viviane Yargeau, a McGill University professor, is helping to administer the study. In an interview with La Presse, Yargeau admitted that the methods are "non-traditional", but it is an effective way to get information that can otherwise be hard to come by.
Since most recreational drugs, including cannabis for now, are illegal, it can be difficult to get accurate information from volunteers about their actual drug use. So, the agency is turning to a substance that has nothing to hide -- your urine, along with everyone else's, in the sewers beneath the city.
As CJAD 800 Medical Correspondent Mitch Shulman points out, "some you breathe out, some you poo out, but almost all of them, you pee out." It makes searching in the sewers an easy and effective place to learn more about drug habits.
The method of testing waste-water for a perspective on city-wide drug use is not new: it's been in use by many European municipalities for over a decade. It's extremely effective, with researchers often able to pinpoint what day of the week a drug was ingested by a person.
Yargeau cautions that it can only paint so clear a picture, however. Because everyone's waste is all together, "we cannot really tell how many people are consuming, we can only tell how much was consumed by the entire population." Still, she says, it provides one of the most complete pictures researchers have seen thus far.
Analysts aren't just looking for signs of cannabis use in the urine they're testing: in all, they're checking for 19 substances, including the deadly drug fentanyl.
If they can get reliable results, Statistics Canada plans to eventually use its methods studying Montrealers' drug habits to municipalities across the country.
The first results from the study are expected in mid-April.