Isn't someone on medication actually dumping pharmaceuticals into the environment when they use them?
July 25th, 2010 | 
Author: Okay… People are using medication.. Aren’t they actually dumping this medication into the environment when they use the restroom?
Or when someone flushes their old medication down the drain?
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Yes, they are. We live in a rural area. It’s interesting to talk to the guys who pump septic tanks for a living (believe it or not!).
They can tell if the folks in the house take a lot of medication, by how healthy their septic tank is. People who take a lot of medication can actually stop the natural bacterial break down process in their septic system. (They can also tell what kind of soaps/detergents the homeowner uses)
Of course city sewage treatment plants deal with this same problem, but on a much larger scale. The problem is, they really do not have a way to clean the pharmaceuticals out of the water. Sunlight does help, and breaks many of them down. However many of them are unaffected and are going strait into our water ways.
This is one of the reasons we plan to get all of our drinking water only through a rainwater catch system when we build our new house. Of course this leads to a different set of problems, as you do not recieve any of the trace minerals then.
If you want to demonstrate to someone how they are flushing drugs from their body and putting it into the septic system, have them take a Vitamin B pill. Turns their urine bright yellow for a time or two as their bodies flush the excess drugs Vitamin B from their body. All that ends up "down the drain." Same thing happens with other drugs we are unable to see.
~Garnet
Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years
15 years working in the medical field
I must admit, that is an interesting question to ponder. On the point of human waste from someone who is using medication, technically yes, I suppose they are dumping their medication into the environment – however that would only be the solids left over (if it were a tablet for instance), as the body would have absorbed most of the chemicals contained in the medication. On flushing medication down the toilet, no brainer there – definitely polluting the environment.
Absolutely! I’m working on a research project at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (www.esf.edu) about this right now. For example, women that use birth control actually add estrogen to the water supply. This may seem like a small problem, but there is so much estrogen that it is actually beginning to change the sex of fish in the streams and rivers. Anti-depressants are a problem as well. When a person dies, their old medication is actually flushed down the toilet, so not only are we urinating the pharmaceuticals into the water, but are also straight up dumping them in. These drugs actually bio-accumulate in the fat of fish and bio-magnify as they are eaten (10x as bad with every step). So by the time you eat the fish, you are in trouble. That’s one of the reasons you’re not supposed to eat the fat of fish. Fish in Lake Ontario are so bad, for a few years, you weren’t supposed eat them at all.
Yes, they are, and poor water quality due to this is a hot issue right now. Livestock pharmaceuticals are hot too, as most livestock waste is not treated at all before it runs off into streams, etc.
Interestingly, most pharm waste is excreted in the urine, and I have read articles where people propose using special toilets to collect the urine separately and treat it, rather than treating the entire sewage stream at the municipal sewage plant. It’s an interesting idea, but how they could get people to do it is another question.