Happy, coked up fish?

At least the fish are happy now.

It must be a real pain to keep their coke dry. It also explains a LOT about the board behavior around these parts. Me thinks some should cut back and some should eat up!

We've seen that story a bunch lately. Sounds like the 3 H's of salmon and steelhead decline need a fourth member added: Heroin.

Revolting, if not altogether avoidable or likely to slow down.

CLICK ME CLICK ME! I'm SLAMMING someone, you won't BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!

This is a super awesome example of how we can get nothing done in the current climate...

Working backwards from "Seattle-Caught Salmon Found To Contain Cocaine, Antidepressants, And Pain Relievers" -- from the authoritative "NaturalBlaze"... Note the picture of ADULT salmon at the top -- which is not what the study covers. We find it's referencing a Seattle Times article... Slighly more authoritative, let's click to that.

We find a less spectacular headline "Drugs found in Puget Sound salmon from tainted wastewater". Certainly less "sky is falling" tone in this article, some fairly muted concerns, and an accurate photo of a beach seine and some small/juvenile fish. This article references the study itself, let's go there.

We find a muted "Contaminants of emerging concern in a large temperate estuary" article and some interesting bioaccumulation stats on juvenile salmon vs. resident (they say "site fidelity") fish. If you're eating whole, juvenile salmon, this is perhaps interesting.

Global health crisis? Nope.

Global information distortion crisis? See presidential election candidates.

Be interesting to see the contamination levels of other major inside water bodies adjacent to other first world metropoli.... say SF Bay, Chesapeake Bay, Lake Michigan... just to put things into perspective.

Interesting eyeFISH you bought up SF Bay in your post since before retiring up here 20+ years ago with my local gal wife I lived down there in "The Golden State" Eat any fish from that Bay? Are you serious! Caught tons of LARGE sturgeon in upper San Pablo Bay off China Camp but it was all C&R. Stripers? Great fishery back in the day off Ocean Beach and points south after they left the upper Bay but no TY on those Bay fish! Salmon outside the GG? I was in all the time but never liked those Farallon Island Chinook due to those radioactive barrel dumps out there! Pick your poison fits I guess..... Ignorance is BLISS I guess!

I work for a company that does wastewater treatment. I am by no means an expert but I do get to listen to the experts speak... everything we injest will end up in our waste, and from what I hear, the chemicals we are injesting have been refined to the point that they are so dissolved in the waste stream that they cannot be removed by conventional means...

We are dumping millions of gallons a day of wastewater and that water contains a tons of the chemicals we injest... asprin, ibuprofin, birth control pills, alchohol, drugs... if we ingest it we piss and poop it...

we are trying to come up with ways to use wastewater without dumping it, but usually that requires cleaning it to a point that the cost to treat it outweighs the benefit...

when water becomes scarce only then will we be able to afford to treat it to the level that is safe to reuse it...

Here is a link to a preliminary report presented to the WDFW Commission in Aug 2015 with particular interest in the extreme mortality loss of south Sound smolt: http://wdfw.wa.gov/commission/meetings/2015/08/aug0715_06_presentation.pdf.

The last 10 pages are of particular interest.

If you eat Big Macs, this should be of little concern to you. Doesn't really matter what junk you put in your body...

If on the other hand this is a major issue in your life, you probably aren't reading this because you are so far off the grid you are hunting and growing your own organic foods...

I've been thinking about my funeral. Curious. :shrug Would being cremated, viking style, destroy the toxins in my body? Or would it just send them airborne?

As Piper noted, many of the pollutants are in really low concentrations. Parts per billion. When you are treating hundreds of cfs of water it becomes impossible to economically find and treat that molecule.

It can be done, but at a great cost. It will be similar to what we use water for when our source is desalinization plant water. Fewer swimming pools...

Snoqualmie waste water treatment plant dumps all their so called clean/treated water right into the river just above the falls. yummy!

I'm trying to figure out how to snort a salmon.

freeze dry the slime and you will be good to go.

Actually if I did coke at this age I'm pretty sure I'd lock up and have a heart attack!