DAILY PROPAGANDA: Salmon Junkies

*Warning: PIRATE RADIO presentation*

There’s a drug epidemic going on in Seattle that you probably aren’t aware of. Youth have been found with elevated levels of Prozac, Advil, Benadryl, Lipitor and even cocaine.

But it isn’t the human population of the “Emerald City” that’s suffering, at least not yet. Alarming levels of 42 types of pharmaceuticals and personal care products have been found in young chinook salmon and staghorn sculpin living in Puget Sound.

New research has indicated that salmon found in Puget Sound near Seattle have tested positive for more than 80 different drugs. (Thinkstock/redstallion)

“The concentrations … were higher than we expected,” Jim Meador, an environmental toxicologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, told the Seattle Times. “You have to wonder what it is doing to the fish.”

These drugs are showing up in the tissues of juvenile fish, researchers have found, thanks to tainted wastewater discharges.

“We analyzed samples for 150 compounds and we had 61 percent of them detected in effluent,” Meador, who co-wrote a study documenting the issue, told the Times. “So we know these are going into the estuaries.”

According to the study, researchers found levels of 81 different substances in effluent, 25 in estuary water, and 42 in fish tissue.

Nearly 30 compounds that were detected in effluent and fish tissue were not found in estuarine waters, the study found, indicating a high potential for bioaccumulation - when an organism absorbs a substance at a rate faster than that at which the substance is lost - for these compounds.

Why are the levels so high? Meadow told the Times it could be because people in the area use more of the drugs detected, or it could be related to wastewater-treatment plants’ processes.

But Betsy Cooper permit administrator for the county's Wastewater Treatment Division told Natural News that the blame shouldn’t fall solely on area treatment centers.

The tests found that young fish contained a massive range of drugs - Flonase, Aleve, Tyleno, Paxil, Valium and OxyContin to name a few. (USFWS)

"Treatment plants in King County are effective in removing some drugs in wastewater, butmany drugs are recalcitrant and remain,” she said. “You have treatment doing its best to remove these, chemically and biologically," she said, "but it's not just the treatment quality, it's also the amount that we use day to day and our assumption that it just goes away."

Although concentrations of most of the detected substances were present at relatively low concentrations, the study revealed that overall inputs to each estuary amounted to several kilograms of these compounds per day.

Even fish tested in the Nisqually estuary, which receives no direct municipal treatment-plant discharge, were contaminated.

“That was supposed to be our clean reference area,” Meador told the Times.