Carlos Barria/Reuters
- China has been going hard in its war on drugs.
- Its efforts are so intense that some cities have started analyzing sewage for traces of drugs to root out users and dealers.
- That work has helped catch at least one drug manufacturer, and the country plans to expand the program in the future.
- This raises the question: Does a person’s sewage belong to them, or to the Chinese state?
China is so desperate to crack down on illegal drug use that some of its cities are analyzing people’s sewage in the hope of finding drug users by analyzing their waste.
Officials have been chemically examining sewage for traces of drugs or metabolites — bodily substances created after the human body interacts with certain drugs — in people’s urine, according to a report in Nature magazine, which cites a Chinese environmental chemist involved in the efforts.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
NOW WATCH: I spent a day with Border Patrol agents at the US-Mexico border
See Also:
- Nerve agent victim describes ‘oily substance’ disguised as perfume that killed his girlfriend when he unwittingly gave it to her as a gift
- A World War II battleground is now another flash point in China’s influence campaign in the Pacific
- How Ukraine faked the death of a famous anti-Putin journalist, who was taken to a morgue wrapped in a sheet with pig blood smeared round his mouth