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The sewers that traced COVID have been turned toward the nation's drug use

A disease-tracking sewage system has been repurposed for drug surveillance. No law stops officials from narrowing the readings to name residents

Paul Chinn / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

The same sewer pipes that told public health officials where COVID-19 was spreading could now be used to identify the people flushing into them. The White House's 2026 National Drug Control Strategy recently directed the government to build a national wastewater-monitoring system so officials can "monitor drug consumption in real-time." The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has already put the system into operation, publishing its first wastewater drug report in July. It drew on samples from over 100 counties — or roughly a fifth of the country's people — and detected more than 500 substances.

The ONDCP found the highest concentrations of fentanyl in Washington, cocaine in Texas, and methamphetamine in Colorado and Nevada, and described these state-level findings as indicating "which states may include potential hotspots that warrant further examination of drug consumption and trafficking." Framing the sewage readings as leads to be pursued, the office says the data is a tool "for parents, teachers, medical professionals, and law enforcement officials," placing police among the intended users of a system originally built for epidemiologists.

The system only exists because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assembled it at extraordinary speed during the pandemic. It started with 209 sampling sites in September 2020 and had passed 1,500 by December 2022, expanding its reach from 12% of the U.S. population to 45%, or almost 155 million people.

CDC researchers were candid about what they........

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