If someone were to say that, you might think that they were a paranoid psychotic. Well, it turns out they wouldn’t be.
She plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40 Oregon communities.
The science behind the testing is simple. Nearly every drug — legal and illicit — that people take leaves the body. That waste goes into toilets and then into wastewater treatment plants.
“Wastewater facilities are wonderful places to understand what humans consume and excrete,” Field said.
I’ll bet guys are lining up to take her on a date! When people are storing urine and feces in jars in their basement, because they really are out to get you, things certainly will have taken a turn for the surreal.
I just can’t get past these words without laughing “Wastewater facilities are wonderful places…”
How long till they start sampling on a block by block basis . . . just for research of course. . . . oh, and maybe to give probable cause.
I’d say “Nah!!! Never!” But Supreme Court recently said it wasn’t cool to use IR cameras to find people using grow lights. The Supreme Court also says it’s fine for the police to dig through your trash. Is your feces and urine going into a public sewer equivalent to trash? I don’t know, but I’ll bet it ends up before The Court at some point!
What about false positives? Poppy seeds will cause the community to test positive for opiates.
I wonder why police don’t already try to mess with plumbing while performing a raid.
They do sometimes, to recover flushed evidence.
If the rationale is anything like the IR case, it would be “no”, because a common person can’t interfere with your plumbing (or look through your house); but they can open your garbage can and root around.
(Heck, some places, bums do it regularly to get cans for the deposit.)
As that is now, looking at it community-wide at the treatment-plant level, to get data on the community rather than on individuals, there is of course no Constitutional issue at all; the data is inherently and irrevocably anonymous and neither search nor seizure of a person or their effects occurs.