Germans taking more cocaine than was thought

11 November 2005

BERLIN – New research shows that Germans are consuming far more cocaine than was previously thought.

According to a Spiegel Online report, a new study using water samples taken from the Rhine river near Dusseldorf shows that almost 11 tons of pure cocaine with a street value of EUR 1.64 billion is consumed annually by the 38.5 million population that live in the river’s watershed.

The study was conducted by the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research (IBMP) in Nuremberg, who checked the levels of benzoylecgonine in the water. Benzoylecgonine is produced in the body when cocaine is broken down and enters the water supply through urine.

The results show that current statistics of cocaine use among Germans grossly underestimate the scale of the reality. The German government and the EU have until now assumed that 0.8 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 59 in Germany – around 400,000 people – use the drug at least once a year.

However the new river data implies that if this number of users were correct, then each user would have to consume 16 lines of the drug per day, a somewhat unlikely scenario. The inevitable conclusion is that there are far more cocaine consumers than was previously thought.

Analysis of river water to determine cocaine usage has also been carried out on the Thames in London and the Po River in Italy, revealing that the equivalent of 80,000 and 40,000 lines respectively are being consumed daily in the two rivers’ watersheds.

Subject: German news, cocaine use