You are drinking your crap

The top headline at CNN.com this morning was Pharmaceuticals Found in US Drinking Water. From the article: "People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue."

Okay, I'm not dumb. I knew that toilet and sink water went to treatment plants and was treated and returned to the water supply. Now that I've read that though it seems so ridiculous and so completely gross. And, I'm wondering what exactly the filter I have installed on my sink actually filters for - I assume not shit and drugs. Hmmm. I've been really trying to move back towards filtered tap water (with my new reusable water cup that I won from Greenstyle Moms contest with SIGG bottles) and away from plastic water bottles. I guess it doesn't matter, b/c a lot of the bottled water is also treated tap water and no one is treating water for trace amounts of drugs anyway.

Sidebar...I'm also thinking about the time we took a trip with some friends in an RV and had to stop at one of those treatment plants. There is NOTHING more disgusting and simultaneously hilarious than being completely hungover, pulling into a shit factory (literally), having it be 90+ degrees, seeing a shit monitor guy riding his bike around the pools and wheels of shit, and watching 2 of your friends emptying the bathroom tank and dry-heave at the same time. Probably one of the funniest experiences of my life - we still crack up about it to this day. And throw up a little in our mouths.

Back to the topic at hand...it seems to reason that you shouldn't flush or throw out your old medications - RX or OTC. I was curious what you should do so I googled how to dispose of medication. The white house says to separate drugs from their original containers, render them unusable (some other sites also suggest to crush pills, mix w/ glue, mix w/ kitty litter) and throw them in the trash, except for a list of specific drugs which should be flushed like Oxycodone, Percocet, Morphine (seriously?). Another site called Ecocycle cited this same policy officially; but they also answered an inquiry with the suggestion that you might not want to flush them rather to try to take them back to the pharmacy for "proper disposal" (whatever that means). I guess only certain pharmacies will accept unfinished/expired meds, so you'd have to find one and who knows if they'd take an RX that wasn't dispensed by them originally. Plus, then someone other than you would know that you didn't actually finish all 10 days of that antibiotic (do you ever?). There are apparantly some programs that will recycle medications to third world countries and all that, but my problem is usually expired medication and not unused ones.