Is Your Drinking Water Drug Free?

Peer inside a glass of tap water. You may not see mood stabilizers, sex hormones, antibiotics, and anti-convulsants, but if you are like some 41 million other Americans, trace amounts of those and other pharmaceuticals are there for the drinking. 

Gulp! The Associated Press first reported the presence of more than  1,000 active pharmaceutical ingredients found in tap water. Meanwhile the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is downplaying the potential health implications. “You’d have to drink eight 8 ounce glasses of tap water a day for 11,000 days to get a child’s dose of Acetaminophen [Tylenol],” says Virginia Thompson, Sustainable Healthcare Coordinator for EPA Region 3.

At the same time, the EPA is focused on preventing pharmaceutical tap water pollution in the first place. “We encourage people not to flush their medicines down the toilet,” says Thompson. “The best way to dispose old or unwanted medicines in an environmentally sound way is to mix your medicines in coffee grounds or kitty litter and put them into something impermeable, like a laundry detergent container.” 

Don't trust the government's word that your tap water is safe? The alternatives may be costly, but not necessarily safer. Eco-blogs, such as NoImpactMan and Treehugger jumped on the topic, but mostly to dissuade people from using it as a reason to drink bottled water.

Their rationale is that several bottled-water brands, like Coca-Cola's (KO)  Dasani or PepsiCo's (PEP) Aquafina, are not much better than tap water. They often come from public water sources, which aren't tested or treated for these particular polluters. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn't require water bottlers to test for drugs and most don't yet make a point of filtering them out, according to the AP report.