Short abstract:

We examine how wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) translates from environmental science to drug policy, and back again, and how ‘drugs’, ‘harm’, and its ‘reduction’, are problematised. WBE demands renewed attention to the biotic dimensions of drugs as they entangle in their different environments.

Long abstract:

In 2001, a modest proposal was posited by the US Office of Research and Development in the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal, made not by drug policy experts but rather by environmental chemists, was for a “nonintrusive tool to heighten public awareness of societal use of illicit-abused drugs and their potential for ecological consequences” (Daughton, 2001). Since then, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has increasingly been regarded as an important adjunct to established drug monitoring tools, promising cleaner and more accurate evidence.

In this paper, we examine how WBE translates from environmental science to drug policy, and back again, and how ‘drugs’, ‘harm’, and its ‘reduction’, are problematised in these moves. By tracing the accretion of WBE in global drug monitoring, including through the World Drug Report, we find that WBE works to multiply complexities, relocating ‘harm’ and demanding renewed attention to the biotic dimensions of drugs as they entangle in their different environments. Drugs are remade not only as a problem of human health or clandestine markets, but as an ecological concern. Extending what Rhodes and colleagues have termed an ‘ecological harm reduction’ our analysis illuminates how a move towards ecologies entails new associations – no longer simply attributing harm as an effect of the object of drugs-chemicals but noticing the new hybrids that emerge. This shifts attention to the combination of how drugs, human bodies, animal bodies, and their environments, as well as epidemiological technologies and regimes of drug surveillance, come together in the circumstance of their meeting.