Take Three Times A Day With Water

The Associated Press tested drinking water around the country and found traces of pharmaceuticals:

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

These are not just expired meds from the cabinet we've flushed away but current ones our bodies have passed after taking what they can use.

And what's in the water?

-- Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.

-- Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

-- Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

-- A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.

-- The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

-- Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.

People once panicked over fluoride in drinking water, thinking it would dull the creative part of the mind and leave us vulnerable to a communist conspiracy. (Other health issues with fluoridated water have since popped up.) We don't know yet what all these drugs are doing to us, but this we can safely conclude: we're not getting much healthier. It also seems pointless now to pay for vitamin-enriched water when you can drink spiked stuff right from the tap.

A friend once dropped his jaw when I told him I drank water from the faucet.

"You drink that stuff?"

"Yeah! I have since I was kid -- and look what it's done to me." I unleashed a sinister laugh worthy of a Saturday night horror flick.