How amphetamine use may be affecting our waterways

Speed and other recreational stimulants are tied to heart damage

Middle-aged adults who use recreational amphetamines such as speed, ecstasy or ice may develop a prematurely aging heart and experience health problems normally associated with older people, a recent study suggests. People may crave the euphoric feelings produced by amphetamines, but these drugs have long been linked to heart attack, stroke, artery wall damage, bleeding in the brain, abnormal heart rhythm and sudden cardiac death, said lead study author Stuart Reece of the University of Western Australia. “It makes sense that all these different issues are linked by an underlying acceleration of the aging effect,” Reece said by email. “We found that the effect was very considerable indeed.” Amphetamines are a stimulant, and they send what’s known as the “fight or flight” hormone adrenaline into overdrive. Previous research has linked these drugs to premature aging of the skin; the Australian research suggests amphetamines might also prematurely age the heart. For the study, researchers measured blood flow through a main artery in the upper arm and forearm for 713 people in their 30s and 40s at a clinic for substance misuse. Arteries harden with age. Each patient was asked about drug use and placed in one of four groups: nonsmokers, smokers, amphetamine users and methadone users. (Methadone is given to people trying to overcome addiction to heroin.) Researchers used a blood pressure cuff and monitoring system to calculate what they described as biological vascular age by matching the extent of hardening in the arteries with the participants’ chronological age, gender and height. The number of amphetamine users in the study was relatively small — 55. Almost all of them said they had used these stimulants within the previous week, and about half had used the drugs in the day before being tested with the blood pressure cuffs. Even after accounting for several risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as weight, cholesterol levels and inflammation, amphetamine use was still independently associated with an “advancement” of cardiovascular age, researchers report in the journal Heart Asia. The accelerated aging seen with amphetamines appeared to be even more pronounced than that seen with tobacco use, and it was equivalent to about a 25 percent increase over chronological age, Reece said — in other words, giving an otherwise average 40-year-old a cardiovascular age of around 50. Beyond the small number of amphetamine users in the study, another limitation is the lack of data on how much of the stimulants people used, the authors note. Stimulants such as Adderall, Ritalin and Concerta are often prescribed to children and adults diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in doses that are not associated with cardiovascular problems. “At therapeutic doses, stimulant medications have been shown to be safe,” said Jose Martinez-Raga, a researcher at Spain’s University of Valencia, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Amphetamine abuse implies using these stimulant drugs over long periods of time and generally with much larger doses than those commonly prescribed for medical reasons,” Martinez-Raga added by email. All stimulants work by increasing the amount of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical linked to pleasure, movement and attention. People who take amphetamines in doses higher than is typically prescribed can experience a rapid surge of dopamine that can trigger euphoria and increase the risk of addiction. “No medical patient smokes or shoots their pills,” Reece said. “These high levels are very addictive, they are very damaging, and they produce great spikes in blood pressure and heart rate which are straining and damaging both for the heart itself and for the blood vessels.” ** — Reuters  **

Federal regulators reject railroads’ request to delay new drug-testing rule

Federal regulators, faced with soaring drug use among railroad workers, have rejected an industry request to postpone required testing for the more than 36,000 employees who maintain rail lines. “The country is in the throes of a devastating substance abuse crisis,” said Sarah E. Feinberg, who heads the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). “The rail industry and its workforce are not immune from this crisis — we know that in fact many are suffering.” Feinberg on Thursday rejected a petition to extend by one year a drug and alcohol testing requirement set to take effect in June. “Delaying track workers from being included in the group of railroad employees tested for drugs and alcohol would delay the important work of preventing injuries and fatalities,” Feinberg said. The Association of American Railroads (AAR), which represents freight railroads, signed the petition, but later withdrew its objection. “Freight railroads in the country already have drug and alcohol testing programs in place for employees, support the rule and can meet the 2017 deadline for track workers, this is a priority for the industry,” AAR spokesman Ed Greenberg said. Nearly 8 percent of workers involved in rail accidents this year tested positive for drug use, including marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, benzodiazepine, OxyContin and morphine, according to internal federal documents obtained by The Washington Post in September. That number was the highest since the FRA began keeping records in 1987 and three times higher than it was 10 years ago. Overall, the number of engineers, train crew and dispatchers who tested positive for drug use in random tests rose by 43 percent last year. After rail accidents in 2014, no one tested positive for drugs, and just two people did last year. Railroad drug-testing has been limited to about 120,000 “safety sensitive” workers whose performance puts lives at risk. The train-repair workers and about 70 percent of the more than 36,000 workers who maintain track beds and railroad right-of-ways are not yet required to undergo the same testing. The U.S. Transportation Department drug-tests about 7 million people who hold commercial driver’s licenses, as well as railroad and transit workers, and the U.S. Coast Guard. In the past five years, the DOT tests have shown sharp increases in use of amphetamines and natural opiates. The popularity of illegal prescription drugs and heroin has increased dramatically in the United States. in recent years. A record 28,647 people died of heroin and prescription opioid use in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, 47,055 people died of drug overdoses in 2014, the CDC said. The FRA and the railroads it regulates have been at the forefront of federal drug testing since 1987, when an Amtrak train collided with three Conrail freight locomotives linked together just north of Baltimore. The engineer and 15 others on the Amtrak train were killed; 174 other people on the trains were injured. Investigators determined that the engineer of the Conrail train and his brakeman had shared a marijuana joint as they made their way from the rail yard. The engineer, Ricky Lynn Gates, was convicted on state and federal charges and served four years in prison. In 1993, he told the Baltimore Sun that smoking marijuana was the cause of the crash and that it was not the first time he had done it on the job.

Fish exposed to anxiety medication show altered behavior, study finds

What happens to a fish on drugs? If it’s a wild European perch exposed to a popular anxiety medication, chances are it’s antisocial, wanders away from the safety of its group and devours food more quickly than its peers — all behaviors that could have profound ecological consequences, according to a forthcoming report in the journal Science. In a study aimed at further understanding the environmental impacts of pharmaceuticals that often wind up in the world’s waterways through wastewater, researchers from Umea University in Sweden examined how perch behaved when exposed to oxazepam, a drug commonly used to treat anxiety disorders in humans. The scientists exposed the fish to concentrations of the drug similar to those found in the waters near densely populated areas in Sweden. The result? “Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools. This is a known strategy for survival and growth. But those who swam in oxazepam became considerably bolder,” ecologist Tomas Brodin, lead author of the article, explained. They “lost interest in hanging out with the group.” Brodin told an audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston on Thursday: “We think it’s working through stress relief on the fish. It removes the fear of being eaten.” He said that researchers conducted a “boldness test” on the perch, opening a door that would allow them to swim from a small box into a much larger water tank. The fish with no drugs in their system remained timid and “didn’t come out at all,” he said, while those on oxazepam did. The researchers said those behaviors, coupled with the tendency to scarf down food faster than normal, could alter the composition of the species and lead to ecological changes in the real world. For example, if they consumed more plankton, it could lead to an increase in algae. Although Brodin and his colleagues focused on oxazepam in their research, they noted that residue from a “veritable cocktail of drugs” can be found in waterways worldwide. Past studies have confirmed that an ever-growing cocktail of pharmaceuticals and other pollutants — including shampoos, perfumes, heart medications, painkillers and birth control pills — exists in waterways across the globe. There has been scant evidence thus far that the chemical traces pose any dangers to humans, but researchers have plenty to learn. The Environmental Protection Agency has conducted or funded a growing body of research aimed at better understanding the sources and types of drugs that wind up in wastewater and in fish. The agency also has studied drug disposal practices in hospitals, hospices and other facilities and has said it will take regulatory actions whenever appropriate to limit the amount of pharmaceuticals that end up in water. The Food and Drug Administration has said that the main way that drugs enter water systems is by passing through individual patients. But the agency also has issued guidelines for safely disposing of prescription drugs, urging consumers to avoid flushing them down the toilet and to take advantage of community “take-back” programs that allow people to turn over unused drugs for proper disposal. As part of its drug approval application process, the FDA also requires companies to submit an assessment of how the drug’s use would affect the environment. “The solution to this problem isn’t to stop medicating people who are ill,” said Jerker Fick, a co-author of the Science report, “but to try to develop sewage treatment plants that can capture environmentally hazardous drugs.” Deciding who is responsible for preventing potentially harmful drugs from polluting the nation’s water supply remains an evolving question. The pharmaceutical industry, for instance, has strongly opposed a law in one California county that would require drugmakers to fund and operate a take- back program there. Various other state lawmakers have also proposed legislation to force drug companies to pay for take-back initiatives, to no avail. PhRMA, which represents research-based U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, has said that it supports other initiatives that educate consumers about safe disposal of unused and expired medications. Brodin and Fick said Thursday that, given the drug residues observed in many waterways, fish throughout the world might already be affected like those in their lab. “Probably these behavioral effects are happening even as we speak,” Brodin said. “It might actually change the ecosystem’s function and the ecosystem dynamics in the long run.”

Europe’s drug use, in 2 maps

LONDON — Most of Europe may be united through the European Union, but when it comes to illicit drugs, geographical differences could hardly be more apparent.  Concentrations of cocaine and MDMA, also known as ecstasy, were higher in larger cities compared with smaller towns. “More than three-quarters of cities show higher loads of [cocaine] and MDMA in wastewater during the weekend (Friday to Monday) than during weekdays. In contrast, amphetamine and methamphetamine use were found to be distributed more evenly over the whole week,” the report concludes. In the slider maps below, you can see how consumption differs on the weekend and weekdays: On the left side, you see MDMA consumption from Monday to Friday. The map on the right shows consumption during the weekend. Whereas MDMA use was fairly even among European countries, the consumption of other drugs was more pronounced in certain nations. “Cocaine use is highest in western European cities, in particular in cities in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and in some southern and northern European cities,” the report’s authors said. “Wastewater analysis indicates that cocaine use is very low to negligible in the majority of eastern European cities.” A similar geographical division was found among methamphetamine users. That drug was found in particularly high concentration in Norwegian, Czech and Slovak cities, as well as in Dresden, a city in eastern Germany that is close to the border with the Czech Republic. The differing geographical consumption patterns are clearly visible on this slider map. The map on the left shows weekend consumption of cocaine, while the image on the right visualizes methamphetamine consumption during the same time frame.

Europe’s drug use, in 2 maps

Music festival causes spike in ecstasy and caffeine in nearby river

It turns out that massive music festivals might not just be a noise disruption for locals -- they might be causing issues for nearby aquatic life, too. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, these events could be introducing dangerous drugs like ecstasy and ketamine into the water supply, leaving traces of them in rivers and soil.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The study is part of an effort to research so-called "emerging contaminants," (ECs) or things like drugs (both prescribed and recreational) and hygiene products that end up in waste water. According to recent studies, only about half of these contaminants are actually removed during the water treatment process. So eventually, they can end up back in our drinking water -- and in our fish.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Researchers were particularly interested in how certain events -- like football games, holiday weekends, and tourist attractions -- could cause spikes or even changes in these sneaky contaminants. After all, it stands to reason that an influx of people (especially a large group all doing the same activity) would have an effect. The researchers measured contaminant levels in Hengchun, a popular vacation destination in Taiwan. ECs were higher in Hengchun rivers than in other areas, despite the low population of the town. That wasn't unexpected -- since the area is popular with tourists, it often has extra people hanging around flushing their waste. These areas also showed a lower concentration of illicit drugs. So the researchers also weren't surprised that contaminants spiked during popular travel times, like weekends and seasons with good weather. But during the "Spring Scream," an event that draws over 600,000 young music fans to the beach town, things got a little crazy. Daily sampling during the week of Spring Scream found big spikes in drugs like ecstasy, ketamine, and caffeine -- exactly the cocktail of "fun" drugs one would expect hoards of young music festival goers to partake in. Meanwhile, more benign drugs -- like ibuprofen -- were fairly consistent before, during, and after the concerts. This isn't the first indication that sewage can be affected by one-off events. Studies of water near universities have found spikes in amphetamine (taken illicitly by many students to enhance their studying) during exam periods, for example. Another study found that levels of party drugs like cocaine and ecstasy spike in the London area on weekends.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It's not as if going for a swim in this water could get you high. But the concern is that people and animals are being exposed to varying mixtures of different drugs at different concentrations -- so it's hard to guess just what the long-term effects might be. And research has indicated that some of the drugs that change behavior in humans might also change the behavior of aquatic animals exposed to them, so this party drug pollution is something that warrants a closer look.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Looking at sewage to figure out drug use in various European cities

Tabloid journalists have long known that you can discover dirty secrets by going through people’s garbage. Now, researchers have done something similar in the name of science, albeit on a grander — and smellier — scale. They have analyzed the sewage of 19 European cities to find out how much of certain illicit drugs people consume. Researchers routinely use surveys, supplemented by data from police and customs officials, to measure illicit drug use. But they have been pushing for more accurate methods. One possibility is to sample the sewage of a city and look for chemical traces of the drugs themselves or metabolites created when a drug passes through the human body. “The surveys tell you what people take, but not how much, not how big the market is,” says Kevin Thomas, a toxicologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research in Oslo and one of the authors of the paper published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment. “Sewage tells you that.” During one week in March 2011, Thomas and colleagues collected daily samples representing 24 hours of sewage flow from treatment plants in 19 cities across Europe. The samples were analyzed for traces of five drugs. Cannabis consumption appeared to be similar throughout Europe, but there were striking regional differences in other drugs. Cocaine use per capita was highest in Belgium and other parts of Western and Central Europe, but lower in the north and the east. Ecstasy use was also highest in the Belgian city of Antwerp, London, and parts of the Netherlands. Meanwhile, methamphetamine levels per capita were highest in Scandinavian cities and Budweis in the Czech Republic. “This is really a snapshot of the drug flow through these European cities in March 2011,” says Thomas. Some of the peaks may be due to drug production rather than consumption, Thomas says. And a spike in the ecstasy load in Utrecht, the Netherlands, might be due to a drug bust that coincided with the testing. “We are going with the theory that they tried to get rid of the evidence by shoving it down the toilet,” says Thomas. A follow-up study will include at least one U.S. city. **— ScienceNOW , the daily online news service of the journal Science**

In Iran, drug trafficking soars as sanctions take bigger bite

Even as Western sanctions ravage their economy, some Iranians are reaping a cash harvest from an unexpected source: a booming illicit drug industry that law enforcement officials say is producing record quantities of a powerful synthetic drug. The surge in drug trafficking from a country with one of the world’s highest rates of opium addiction has alarmed police and intelligence officials from Europe to Southeast Asia, where authorities say they are witnessing a flood of high-quality methamphetamine of Iranian origin. Drug-related violence has spilled into the Caucasus. Regional officials say heavily armed drug gangs wage pitched battles with police and border guards, sometimes using weapons and military hardware taken from battlefields in Afghanistan and Iran. In Azerbaijan, Iran’s northern neighbor, naval patrols in the Caspian Sea are playing cat-and-mouse with Iranian smugglers who use modified speedboats. On land, captured Iranians have been found carrying U.S.-made night-vision goggles, and some have used bombs and armored vehicles to smash through checkpoints, Western and Middle Eastern officials say. Iran has acknowledged that the country faces a serious drug problem. Its officials point to slayings of hundreds of police personnel and border guards as evidence that Iran is a victim of increasingly violent criminal networks. Iranian officials enacted tougher drug laws last year as part of a crackdown that also led to the confiscation of more than three tons of methamphetamine and the execution of dozens of suspected drug dealers. “Meth and heroin dealers are now treated the same,” Brig. Gen. Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, Iran’s national police chief, assured drug-enforcement officials from 11 countries who met at an Interpol conference this year in Tehran. But U.S. and Middle Eastern intelligence officials say Iran has paid far less attention to the flow of drugs out of the country than into it, often failing to cooperate with overseas counterparts attempting to track the flow. “Iran is a black hole,” said a senior U.S. law enforcement official familiar with drug trafficking in the region. At least some of the overseas routes are protected by Iran’s Quds Force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps with a long history of smuggling contraband, according to U.S. officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss confidential assessments of Iran’s drug trade. The Quds Force is closely allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group with deep ties to drug trafficking around the world, including Latin America. “Both of these organizations are now heavily involved in the global drug trade,” Michael Braun, the former operations chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said at a congressional hearing in February. “Their participation in that effort presents them with myriad opportunities with which to build their terrorist and criminal capacity in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.” Iran is hardly the only country tied to the region’s drug trade. Huge profits from sales of narcotics and methamphetamine have attracted criminal gangs from Russia, Turkey and Central Asian states. But U.S. officials say Iranians are becoming dominant players, particularly when it comes to methamphetamine, the highly addictive synthetic stimulant. Iranian drug-makers are mass-producing a form of methamphetamine that is exceptionally pure — so refined that American drug agents say it is almost certainly made by professional chemists in pharmaceutical-grade laboratories. Some of the drugs are couriered out of Iran through the Caucasus, where weak governments and porous borders provide an easy route to the drug markets in Western Europe and beyond, counternarcotics officials and regional experts say. “The region could be the poster child for the nexus of crime and corruption,” said Richard Kauzlarich, a U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan in the 1990s who is deputy director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, a research center at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy. “Unfortunately, it’s a problem for which there is no short-term fix.” For Azerbaijani security officials, the challenge is as plain as the blinking lights on the enormous radar screen in Turkan, where the headquarters for the main coast guard station on the Caspian Sea is based. Here, officers in green uniforms look for blips that might represent drug runners trying to sneak across the maritime border with Iran. Whenever an unidentified craft is spotted — often well after dark on moonless nights — coast guard patrols race to intercept the vessel before it can pull into one of the myriad coves and islands along the coast. Lately, the Iranian crews have shown remarkable resourcefulness in such skirmishes, said Maj. Gen. Farhad Tagi-zada, deputy chief of the country’s State Border Service. “The more we improve our techniques, the more they increase their sophistication,” Tagi-zada, a trim, mustachioed veteran of multiple scrapes with Iranian smugglers. “They are forever trying new methods to try to keep ahead.” Azerbaijan’s fleet of cutters and rapid-response boats, partly paid for by U.S. funds, have used a combination of technology and doggedness to make some major busts. Tagi-zada is particularly proud of an arrest in August, when one of his ships caught up with a small Iranian vessel that had cut its engine to drift past the patrol in the inky darkness. “The smugglers claimed to be fishing, but it was obvious they were lying,” Tagi-zada recalled. After combing the boat and finding nothing, the officers decided to check the seabed beneath the vessel, convinced that the Iranians had tossed their contraband overboard. Divers searched for three days in 60-foot-deep water before finding nearly 25 pounds of heroin wrapped in cellophane, Tagi-zada said. “They were very surprised we had found the stuff in the sea,” he said of the three Iranians, who face trial on smuggling charges. “It truly was like finding a needle in a haystack.” Patrols along Azerbaijan’s land border with Iran have encountered drug gangs with enough firepower to fight a small war. At least seven border guards have been killed in fights with smugglers wielding assault rifles and grenades. Authorities said heavier weapons have been used by drug traffickers to punch holes through a wall built by Iran along its eastern border with Afghanistan. “There have been incidents of wall-breaching involving cars packed with explosives and even tanks,” said a senior security official with the Azerbaijani government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss a problem that affects diplomatic relations with Iran. The official said Azerbaijan has notified U.S diplomats about seized military hardware, including what he called “extremely sophisticated night-vision goggles” that bear U.S. labels. “Clearly, these were stolen or they were abandoned or dropped,” the official said, “presumably by forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.” State Department officials declined to comment on the allegation. Privately, Azerbaijani officials complain about what they see as Iranian hypocrisy in the regional drug war. They accuse Iran’s leaders of making a show of executing drug traffickers at home while doing little to stop the flow of drugs across the border. Officially, the two countries are allies when it comes to drug smuggling, and their governments have worked together to shut down specific networks. Few such channels are available for the United States, which has no diplomatic relations with Iran. In recent months, federal law enforcement officials have watched Iranian drug networks expand to take on new products and markets. Of greatest concern, U.S. counternarcotics officials say, is the emergence of high-quality laboratories in Iran for producing methamphetamine. Because Iran’s base of indigenous meth users is relatively small, production of the drug appears to be aimed exclusively at foreign markets, said the senior U.S. law enforcement official who tracks the Middle Eastern drug trade. “They don’t have a market for it, so they’ve been shipping it to South Asia and, more recently, to Western countries,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. “It is nearly 100 percent pure, and that is indicative of pharmacy involvement.” Only a few containers of Iranian meth have turned up in Western countries, the official said. U.S. officials fear that may change. “They already have the networks, and they’re good at moving stuff back and forth,” the official said. “Our biggest concern now is that they’re trying to open routes to the United States.”

River commission seeking volunteers to keep track of algae

With so much attention quite properly devoted to the snow and cold, and the difficulties they impose, it might be well to recall that spring and summer have their own unpleasant aspects. As an announcement last week from an environmental group suggests, these include algae. As part of a long range program for dealing with the often objectionable growth The Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin is trying to enlist a volunteer network of people and groups who might be described as algae scouts. Algae and certain aquatic plants impair enjoyment of many of the recreational activities associated with rivers and streams. Understanding more about these generally unwelcome plants is an obvious way of learning how to confront them and the problems they may present.. As a means of learning more about where they show up in the Washington region, the commission asked in the announcement last week: “Do you have a favorite stream that you paddle, fish or walk along? “Have you found areas where stringy green algae seems always to grow?” The commission asked further: “How about new stands of plants, or areas where the water always seems green with algae? And the key question: “Would you share your observations with us?” The commission, now in its fifth year of studying the prevalence and ecological impact of plants and algae in freshwater systems, hopes to expand its range and scope to include more rivers and streams. The task “is daunting without the help of volunteers,” the commission’s announcement said. It said the commission hopes to hear from organizations and individuals throughout the river basin and thus to identify “more hot spots” to be targeted later for more intensive, localized research. The commission expects that the volunteers will be able to get snapshots of sites using a newly developed smartphone app. More information is available by contacting Mike Selckmann at GMSelckmann@icprb.org.

Five Western senators question Obama on proposed Alaskan mine

Five Democratic senators are asking President Obama to consider blocking a proposed mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a move that could heighten pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to veto the project. In a letter Monday, the group of senators from Washington, Oregon and California, led by Maria Cantwell (Wash.), argue that their states could suffer economically if a huge gold-and-copper mine moves forward. The EPA is conducting a scientific review of how the project, underwritten by mining giants Northern Dynasty and Anglo American, would affect the region’s aquatic life. The group of senators — which includes Patty Murray (Wash.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.) — points to a recent study by the University of Alaska Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) that estimates that salmon fishing in Bristol Bay provides their states with $500 million in direct income. In addition, the study says, Washington, Oregon and California benefit from $674 million in economic activity from the region’s salmon fishing and processing. “Our states have a strong maritime history of which our commercial fishing industries are a key part,” the senators write. “In order to maintain these direct fishing and processing jobs, and the jobs supported by associated businesses like gear manufacturers, shipbuilders, suppliers and other maritime businesses, we must maintain healthy, sustainable fishery resources.” In the letter, the senators ask Obama to “make staff from both the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of Commerce available to our staff to discuss the implications of this economic report, and how these two agencies, specifically, are working with the EPA to protect our maritime economies.” Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA can invoke the rarely used section 404(c) authority , which bars the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing a federal permit on the grounds that a project would harm the region’s waterways, fish and wildlife. The EPA issued a draft watershed assessment last year saying the mine would probably cause the loss of between 54 and 89 miles of streams and between four and seven square miles of wetlands, and any mining accident there could cause serious damage to the salmon habitat. Agency officials are accepting comments on the analysis until June 30 and have said they have not decided what action they plan to take on the proposed mine. The coalition backing the mine argues that its economic benefits would outweigh any possible environmental damage, and Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski (R) and Mark Begich (D) have warned the EPA against issuing a “pre-emptive veto” of the project. Last month, the Pebble Mine Partnership released an economic analysis estimating that the project would generate 2,500 construction jobs during the five years that it would take to build the facility and up to $180 million in taxes and royalties. The EPA could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Recipe for a healthy Potomac

We appreciate the spotlight that American Rivers shined on the health of the Potomac River in its “America’s Most Endangered Rivers” report last week. Since the passing of the Clean Water Act 40 years ago, we have made great progress in eliminating some of the more visible pollution entering the Nation’s River. But clearly there is much more to be done. Today, many of the pollutants in the Potomac arrive indirectly, rather than out of an industrial pipe. These contaminants are delivered through products and practices that are ingrained in our lifestyles: meat products shot full of antibiotics and steroids, vegetables sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, a variety of potentially harmful household cleaning products, shampoos, deodorants and common pharmaceuticals. Although these are the ingredients of our daily lives, they are also a recipe for disaster — silent pollutants to the Potomac and the communities that pull their drinking water from the river. More obvious is the polluted runoff that inundates streams after rainstorms. These sediment-laden waters carry the toxins of our developed world straight into the river — oil, lawn chemicals, sediment and more. What goes around comes around, as they say, and the longer we defer our river cleanup, the harder we have to work and the more we will pay to keep ahead of the public health consequences of living near, and drinking from, a polluted waterway. The good news, however, is that the nature of this threat means there is much individuals can do to help clean the water. We recommend the following recipe for a healthy Potomac River: ●Add more green space to street and home plans. ●Reduce the use of pavement, and plant trees and shrubs instead of lawns. ●Eliminate the use of fertilizer or limit its use to the fall. ●Use rain barrels and other techniques to collect rainwater. ●Do not flush old medications down the toilet. ●Buy unscented personal hygiene products. ●Support local, organic farms. ●Be active to protect where you live and what you love. Support strong and sensible clean water policies, and demand enforcement of clean water laws. Important action can be taken at the municipal level, too. This year, D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) has set a goal of making the Potomac clean enough for children to swim in and healthy enough that fish pulled from it can be eaten. This is a tremendous long-term commitment to better river health. On the opposite shore, Arlington County has implemented its Green Streets program to address the problem of polluted stormwater runoff. This project turns a typical streetscape into a healthy green filter that stops stormwater in its tracks and gives it time to settle before entering local waterways. Such green street and building designs can break down pollutants before reaching streams and turn unwanted runoff into beneficial groundwater. A key ingredient in the recipe is sufficient investment. Maryland’s General Assembly recently enacted a funding initiative to reduce pollution from stormwater runoff. The legislation requires nine counties and Baltimore City to establish a watershed protection and restoration program to raise revenue to clean local waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. Montgomery County already has a stormwater fee in place. Local governments will charge property owners a fee based on the amount of pavement on their properties. The affected counties and municipalities will have until July 1, 2013, to implement a watershed protection and restoration program. Water is a critical pathway in the delivery of many contaminants to humans. Our organizations see the recent Most Endangered River designation as an opportunity to invite people to join us in helping to continue to clean up and protect the Nation’s River. Until people can swim in the Potomac or eat the fish out of our river without risking their health, there will be much work to do. The writers are, respectively, the presidents of the Potomac Conservancy and Potomac Riverkeeper. **More Local Opinions:** David Alpert: One city, after all James R. Phippard: A hatchet job on my trees Joan E. Beilstein: The meaning of marriage equality ****

HUMANITY’S UNDERWATER NOISE POLLUTION MAY BE KILLING FISH, study finds

They may seem innocuous, but the noises our machines make underwater may be hurting wildlife, according to two recently published studies. The first study, summarized on this blog last week, found that ship noises could hurt endangered killer whales. But a second, published in Nature Communications, finds that noise pollution may have a far more severe effect on smaller fish: It can be fatal.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The effect such noises have on fish matters; as the team of British, Canadian and Australian researchers points out in their paper, the world's coastal regions are "experiencing unprecedented human population growth." That expansion brings with it disruptive technologies. “The combination of stress and poor responses to strikes by predators is why these fish became such easy prey,” Andy Radford of the University of Bristol said in a statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico To measure the disruption, the team of researchers monitored predator and prey fish in tanks and "small isolated experimental patch reefs on sandflats" near Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Some were exposed to common aquatic ambient noise, while others were exposed to that noise mixed with motorboat sounds. (Some were exposed to actual motorboats, too.) The effect of the motorboat noise was pronounced, as the chart below from the paper shows. The presence of the boat was significantly detrimental to survival of _Pomacentrus amboinensis_ , the damselfish they studied.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Of the fish exposed only to the ambient noise, 79 percent survived their first three days. Over the same period, just 27 percent exposed to the boat noise survived. To better understand what was going on, the team of researchers, led by Stephen Simpson of the University of Exeter, identified four ways the fish were affected by the noise. First, it appeared to make them breathe more heavily. Fish that listened to the boat noises consumed 20 percent more oxygen over half an hour than those that hadn't. That effect was even greater when the fish were exposed to an actual boat disturbance: they consumed 33 percent more oxygen, as the below chart from the paper shows. Second, the boat noise dramatically slowed the ability of the fish to respond to a dangerous situation. When a motorboat was "passing," the fish were six times less likely to be startled by a simulated attack from a predator. Even those that did respond were 22 percent slower than their boat-less counterparts. The presence of boat noise also increased a predator's success at capturing the fish. When the boat noise was present, a predator fish — _Pseudochromis fuscus_ , or the dusky dottyback — needed 74 percent fewer strikes to catch their first prey and 82 percent fewer strikes to capture prey in general, the scientists found in an experiment conducted in a tank where making such observations was easier.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The researchers also found that the prey fish were several times more likely to survive without a boat present. In the tank experiment, the prey were 2.9 times more likely to be eaten when listening to a boat than when not. In the experiment in open water, that multiple was 2.4. The researchers ultimately argue that their findings can inform efforts at environmental conservation. It may annoy humans, but noise pollution may prove fatal to some fish. **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This toxin could be causing deadly brain damage in sea lions — and we might be to blame    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico More than half the world’s sea turtles have eaten plastic, new study claims    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These fish started life as boys. Now scientists aren’t sure what sex they are.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why this record-breaking dive from a polar bear is actually tragic    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For pufferfish, motherly love means slathering babies in deadly toxins    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Elizabeth Southerland: Providing the science to keep the nation’s water safe for drinking, swimming and fishing

As new chemicals enter the marketplace and often end up in the nation’s waterways, Elizabeth Southerland’s office at the Environmental Protection Agency produces the research that the agency uses to set water-pollution limits. Southerland routinely meets with state, local, industry and environmental groups concerned about water-quality criteria emerging from her office, which implements major science, technology and regulatory programs under the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Evolving pollution standards are aimed at keeping the country’s rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters safe for swimming, fishing, drinking and aquatic life. “Everything we do is done in a fishbowl, and everyone wants to weigh in on the quality of the science,” said Southerland, director of the Office of Science and Technology in EPA’s Office of Water, who calls those stakeholders “reviewers of our work.” Although passage of the first water pollution control law nearly 70 years ago, and its expansion in 1972, may seem like ancient history, EPA continually examines and updates water-quality criteria based on new findings and better understanding of the science. “We constantly have work going on, collecting data to see if we need to update old science or have new science available,” Southerland said. For example, EPA recently changed a standard on ammonia, a pollutant municipal wastewater treatment plants use to treat sewage, which is toxic to fish and shellfish. Southerland’s office released “a brand new toxicity criterion that’s more stringent than one previously used.” State officials now are discussing with Southerland’s office when they’re going to adopt the criteria, and what approaches municipal treatment plants can use to update their facilities in an affordable way. “We always work on both ends, with the state and the affected party,” said Southerland, 65, who oversees a multidisciplinary staff of 130 people. “Her office prepares the scientific basis for the actions we take here in the water office,” said Ken Kopocis, deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Water. “We’re never finished. There are always new challenges facing us,” he said, pointing to problems in Toledo and Charleston, W. Va., last year, when residents couldn’t use their tap water due to the presence of toxins or chemicals. “We’re always looking at chemicals of concern, and we develop proper standards,” he said. Southerland has her staff cast a wide net for science-based information. They review toxicological studies from around the world, and if that’s insufficient, they may turn to EPA’s Office of Research and Development to perform original research. EPA makes national recommendations on allowable pollutant levels based on that science. Southerland and her staff also work with 10 EPA offices around the country to review and approve, or disapprove, state water-quality criteria used to issue permits to industrial or municipal facilities that discharge pollution into the waterways. Their work also results in national drinking water advisories, which are not mandatory, that water utilities use as guidance to prevent drinking water from containing unhealthy levels of pollutants. Separate from setting water-quality criteria, Southerland’s office establishes national pollution-control technology requirements for industries. Industrial facilities, no matter where they reside, must meet national permit levels based on the best available, economically achievable technology. “Congress’s intent was to prevent pollution havens,” Southerland said. One new and controversial technology rule requires controls on water intake used to cool turbines and machinery at all power plants and some manufacturing facilities. Instead of indiscriminately sucking in huge amounts of water and killing small fish, plants, larvae and other aquatic life, facilities have to install filtering equipment. “There’s all kinds of recommended equipment for how to do it,” Southerland said. “Billions of organisms are killed each year.” Industry believes the rule is too stringent and environmentalists believe it is not stringent enough, Southerland said, which has led to litigation from both sides. She seems unflustered by the controversy. “That’s the process,” she said. “A lot of times the courts rule for EPA, but we’re subject to complete discovery. In the end, we want everyone to feel they had their voice heard.” The job appeals to Southerland, who has a Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering and who, during her 30 years at EPA, also worked on the Superfund hazardous waste program. Her EPA work gives her the opportunity to fix inadequate rules, examine new areas of science and gain access to the world’s literature and leading experts in environmental science. Then her office gets to support recommendations that protect people and marine life, based on the applied sciences that hold such interest for her. “I’m not an abstract person,” she said. “I like to work in things that have immediate effect-on-the-ground actions. That’s what I do that is so exciting.” _This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to the Fed Page of The Washington Post to read about other federal workers who are making a difference. To recommend a Federal Player of the Week, contact us at fedplayers@ourpublicservice.org._

Number of U.S. railroad workers testing positive for drug use skyrockets

Early this year, a railroad worker who had just been briefed on his duties for the day was discovered in a restroom, dead from an overdose of illegal prescription drugs. In the months that followed, tests conducted after three railroad accidents resulted in six employees testing positive for drugs. Testing in 2016 has shown that nearly 8 percent of workers involved in rail accidents were positive for drug use, including marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, benzodiazepine, OxyContin and morphine, according to internal federal documents obtained by The Washington Post. The number of post-accident drug-positives was the highest since the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) began keeping records in 1987 and three times greater than it was 10 years ago. Overall, the number of railway workers — including engineers, train crew and dispatchers — who tested positive for drug use in random tests soared 43 percent last year, the documents show. The number rose to 256 last year from 2014. After rail accidents in 2014, no one tested positive for drugs, and just two people did last year. With more than three months left in this year, 16 rail workers have shown positive in post-accident tests. Railroads transported 565 million passengers and 14.2 million carloads of freight last year. Their workers rank among the most heavily drug-tested employees in the country, faced with drug screening before they are hired, random on-the-job testing and another round of testing every time they make a significant mistake. But after several years in which heroin and illegal opioid use has increased in the general population, there is hard evidence that the use of those and other drugs may be on the rise in the railroad industry. Faced with the initial positive test results, federal regulators began sounding an alarm this spring. This month, the heads of all of the nation’s freight and passenger rail lines were summoned to Washington for a closed-door session to deal with a crisis that federal officials fear has put workers and train travelers at risk. Officials from the FRA, National Transportation Safety Board and the Office of National Drug Control Policy spelled out their concerns and asked the railroads to help them address the growing problem. This week they had a similar private session with railroad unions. “We’ve discussed in depth the kind of data that we are seeing, the uptick in positive post-accident tests, the significant rise in positives in our random testing pool,” FRA Administrator Sarah E. Feinberg said in remarks prepared for the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee on Thursday. “We are seeing a trend going in the wrong direction, and we must address it immediately.” The popularity of illegal prescription drugs and heroin has increased dramatically in recent years, with some analysts suggesting that efforts to crack down on illegal prescriptions have encouraged addicts to use heroin instead. A record 28,647 people died from heroin and prescription opioid use in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and opioids caused more than 6 in 10 overdose fatalities. The CDC said deaths by powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl rose by more than 80 percent. Overall, 47,055 people died from drug overdoses in 2014, the CDC said. Despite drug testing protocols, transportation workers are as susceptible to trends as the rest of society. The U.S. Department of Transportation drug-tests about 7 million people who hold commercial driver’s licenses, as well as railroad and transit workers, and the U.S. Coast Guard. In the past five years, the DOT tests have shown sharp increases in use of amphetamines and natural opiates. Among the railroad workers subject to random testing, however, the approximately 50,000 tests each year had shown no appreciable increase since 2009. Then they shot up by 43 percent last year. What’s more, the number of railroad workers found to be positive for drugs in the aftermath of rail accidents jumped dramatically this year. “We know that the country is struggling with an opioid epidemic — and there is no reason why our industry would be immune from an epidemic affecting the entire country,” Feinberg said. “Workers who are struggling with addiction need, and deserve, our help. Workers who are intoxicated on the job are a danger to themselves, other workers, passengers, and anyone else who may cross paths with a train.” Among the estimated 25,000 railroad workers who repair train engines and rail cars, FRA testing found that alcohol use was five times higher than among railway workers who performed other tasks. Railroad drug testing is limited to about 120,000 workers who are considered “safety sensitive” — those whose performance puts lives at risk. The train-repair workers and about 70 percent of the 37,000 workers who maintain track beds and railroad right-of-ways are not required to undergo the same drug testing. Alarmed by the overall increase in drug use, Feinberg in May finalized a new rule that would require “maintenance of way workers,” as the track workers are known, to undergo the same random drug testing as other workers. The railroads, however, are resisting the proposed rule, which is scheduled to take effect April 1. They have petitioned to delay the testing for an additional 14 months, contending it will require “training supervisors on the signs and symptoms” of drug use. The Association of American Railroads (AAR), which joined regional railroads, railroad construction and transit firms in petitioning for the extension, said the freight railroads it represents would meet the April 1 deadline for testing maintenance workers it employs. “This is an issue that is evident throughout today’s society that requires attention, and the freight rail industry is ready to work with the FRA to further enhance the safety of the nation’s rail network,” AAR spokesman Ed Greenberg said. “Freight railroads not only comply with federally mandated drug and alcohol testing regulations, but go beyond those measures with stringent railroad-specific programs,” Greenberg said. “That said, the freight rail industry recognizes the seriousness of this situation and will work together with the FRA to make the rail system even safer, including supporting the expansion of testing to include items such as synthetic opioids.” Officials said Feinberg views any delay in implementing the rule as unacceptable. The FRA and the railroads it regulates have been in the forefront of drug testing since 1987, when an Amtrak train collided with three Conrail freight locomotives linked together just north of Baltimore. The engineer and 15 others on the Amtrak train were killed; 174 other people on the trains were injured. Investigators determined that the engineer of the Conrail train and his brakeman had shared a marijuana joint as they made their way from the rail yard. The engineer, Ricky Lynn Gates, was convicted on state and federal charges and served four years in prison. In 1993, he told the Baltimore Sun that smoking marijuana was the cause of the crash and that it was not the first time he had done it on the job. The FRA moved quickly in the aftermath of the crash to implement a drug-testing program for railroad workers. Less than four years later, Congress took the next step, requiring drug testing for “safety sensitive” workers in all industries regulated by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The danger to the Potomac River is real

Regarding Robert McCartney’s May 20 Metro column, “Potomac is endangered, but No. 1 ranking’s nothing but hype”: Mr. McCartney’s charge that my organization, American Rivers, distorted the truth by naming the Potomac River the nation’s most endangered river in 2012 is a classic case of shooting the messenger. For nearly 40 years, American Rivers has worked to protect and restore our nation’s rivers, using the list of the most endangered rivers as a critical tool. The report lists rivers facing key actions in the coming year — not the most polluted rivers — and inspires public engagement. We placed the Potomac River at the top of the list this year because it has unacceptable levels of agricultural and urban pollution and because of the threats posed by numerous bills in Congress that would strip the protections for the Potomac and rivers nationwide under the Clean Water Act. The designation of the Potomac and other rivers on our list is based on objective and subjective criteria, including chemical, physical, biological and, yes, political threats. All are real, and we ignore them at our peril and that of our children. ****William Robert Irvin,** Washington** The writer is president of American Rivers.

Prince William County news in brief

The Marine Unit of Prince William County police will increase monitoring next weekend for boating under the influence, as part of the national Operation Dry Water campaign, officials said. From Friday to July 2, law enforcement will be looking for impaired boaters. Boaters will notice an increased police presence on the waterways and at recreational boating checkpoints such as Leesylvania State Park. The department is also offering the following tips for staying safe on the water this summer: • Be a sober boater. Alcohol use is the leading contributing factor in recreational boater deaths. Alcohol and drug use impairs a boater’s judgment, balance, vision and reaction time. • Wear a life jacket. • Take a boating safety education course. For information, visit operationdrywater.org. Last week, Prince William County police released their 2016 crime report, which showed a continued decline in the county’s crime rate. According to the report, 13.7 crimes were committed per 1,000 residents in 2016, down from 14.7 crimes in 2015. Although crimes against property (larceny, robbery and arson) and crimes against people (homicides, assaults and sexual assaults) collectively decreased from the previous year, murders more than doubled. In 2016, 22 people were murdered in the county — the highest rate in the 15 years for which statistics have been reported. Visit pwcgov.org for the complete report. Brad Fairbanks was named the City of Manassas Fire and Rescue Department’s Responder of the Year by the Manassas Rotary Club. Fairbanks, who joined the department in 2012, is responsible for the city’s self-contained breathing apparatus and performs fit testing on all career and volunteer members. Last year, he received the Silver Medal of Valor for bravery from the Prince William County Chamber of Commerce ** — Compiled by Sarah Lane  **

EPA report: More than half nation’s rivers in poor shape

More than half of the country’s rivers and streams are in poor biological health, unable to support healthy populations of aquatic insects and other creatures, according to a nationwide survey released Tuesday. The Environmental Protection Agency sampled nearly 2,000 locations in 2008 and 2009 — from rivers as large as the Mississippi River to streams small enough for wading. The study found more than 55 percent of them in poor condition, 23 percent in fair shape, and 21 percent in good biological health. The most widespread problem was high levels of nutrient pollution, caused by phosphorus and nitrogen washing into rivers and streams from farms, cities and sewers. High levels of phosphorus — a common ingredient in detergents and fertilizers — were found in 40 percent of rivers and streams. Another problem detected was development. Land clearing and building along waterways increases erosion and flooding and allows more pollutants to enter waters. “This new science shows that America’s streams and rivers are under significant pressure,” said Nancy Stoner, acting assistant administrator of the EPA’s water office. “We must continue to invest in protecting and restoring our nation’s streams and rivers, as they are vital sources of our drinking water, provide many recreational opportunities and play a critical role in the economy.” Conditions are worse in the East, the report found. More than 70 percent of streams and rivers from the Texas coast to the New Jersey coast are in poor shape. Streams and rivers are healthiest in Western mountain areas, where only 26 percent were classified as in poor condition. The EPA also found some potential risks for human health. In 9 percent of rivers and streams, bacteria exceeded thresholds protective of human health. And mercury, which is toxic, was found in fish tissue along 13,000 miles of streams at levels exceeding health-based standards. Mercury occurs naturally but also can enter the environment from coal-burning power plants and from burning hazardous wastes. The Obama administration finalized regulations to control mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants for the first time in late 2011. ** — Associated Press  **

Suspended Broncos WR Wes Welker denies drug use, calls NFL’s drug-policy procedures ‘clearly flawed’

Denver Broncos wide receiver has been suspended for four games by the NFL over violations of its performance-enhancing drugs policy, and he’s not at all happy about it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In an e-mail sent to the Denver Post, Welker seemingly takes aim at the league’s drug-testing policy.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The league is only saying that Welker tested positive for amphetamine. A source told the Denver Post’s Mike Klis that the amphetamine in question was adderall, not MDMA (aka Molly) as was speculated by some on Tuesday. As Deadspin points out, MDMA is indeed an amphetamine, but it falls under the league’s recreational-drug policy, not its performance-enhancing drug policy, so it’s seemingly not the drug in question here.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Last September, the Denver Post wrote about how the NFL deals with adderall, a commonly prescribed drug that treats attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but one that also causes feelings of exhilaration, increased energy and mental alertness when used in a non-prescribed manner. It is classified as a performance-enhancing drug and a drug of abuse by the NFL.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In his e-mail to the Denver Post, Welker denied using any sort of drug —  “I wouldn’t have any idea where to get a Molly or what a Molly is. That’s a joke. I don’t do marijuana, I don’t do drugs. I don’t do any drugs,” he wrote — and wondered “if someone put something in his drink” at the Kentucky Derby in May, Klis wrote. Welker was photographed passing out $100 bills to strangers at the Derby after winning big on multiple races.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Welker, whose status for the Broncos’ season opener on Sunday night against the Colts already was in question because of repeated concussions, will now be off Denver’s active roster until Oct. 6. He is not allowed to be at the Broncos facility during the course of his suspension.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Groundbreaking images show how LSD literally lights up your brain

They also found that under LSD, many different areas of the brain contributed to the processing of visual information. Usually, that activity is only focused in the so-called visual cortex. That finding goes a long way to explain why so many people under the effects of LSD report seeing vivid, dream-like hallucinations — even with their eyes closed. The research could help pave the way for treatments for a variety of mental disorders, like addiction and depression. "In many psychiatric disorders, the brain may be viewed as having become entrenched in pathology such that core behaviors become automated and rigid," the study concludes. "Consistent with their dysregulating effect on cortical activity, psychedelics may work to breakdown such disorders by dismantling the patterns of activity on which they rest."    By starting to untangle the mysteries of what actually happens in a brain under the effects of LSD, the researchers hope to open the door to further research, and deeper understanding of the drug's potential risks and benefits. And their findings may shed some light on even loftier questions, such as the nature of consciousness itself. Noting the "altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience," study author Carhart-Harris said in a statement that "our results suggest that this effect ... is also related to what people sometimes call 'ego-dissolution', which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world."

Conserve our water supply by using alternative power sources

The June 17 front-page article “Earth’s groundwater reserves dwindling” brought to the forefront another factor of climate change that is often overlooked: the depletion of many of our water aquifers. The article disclosed that the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains Aquifer is experiencing a negative balance. We are using it faster than it can refill. And I thought only our Western states had a problem. As the article pointed out, mining is a water-intensive activity, and we mine a lot of coal in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. Power plants use 40 percent of the daily freshwater supplies in our nation. This need not be. Alternative forms of power generation (solar and wind) could replace the coal- burning technology that is outmoded and save much of our water supply. Rhode Island has started construction of the first U.S. offshore wind farm. We could replicate that effort off of Norfolk. ****Earle Mitchell** , Springfield**

Most coastal cities will face routine flooding in our lifetimes, NOAA says

When does the threat of climate change become reality? When does a forecast of sea-level rise become a here-and-now problem? In a new study, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, better known as NOAA, grappled with that question, and defined the "tipping point" as the moment when coastal locations routinely experience at least 30 days of flooding each year. By that measure, Annapolis; Wilmington, N.C.; and Washington, D.C., are already in trouble. Seven more cities, including Baltimore, Atlantic City and Port Isabel, Tex., will be there by 2020. And within the next 35 years, the study says, most cities along the Mid-Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts will be dealing with routine flooding. It's important to note that this is not storm-related flooding. That will no doubt happen more frequently, too. The NOAA analysis looked at "nuisance flooding" -- the inundation of city streets and landmarks by routine high tides  -- as measured at and projected for  NOAA tidal stations with a record stretching back at least 50 years. Such flooding is already much more common than in decades past, the report’s co-author, William Sweet, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, said in a written statement, adding: "This is due to sea level rise." "Unfortunately, once impacts are noticed, they will become commonplace rather quickly," Sweet said. "We find that in 30 to 40 years, even modest projections of global sea level rise -- 1½ feet by the year 2100 -- will increase instances of daily high tide flooding to a point requiring an active, and potentially costly response. And by the end of this century, our projections show that there will be near-daily nuisance flooding in most of the locations that we reviewed." The analysis was published Thursday in the American Geophysical Union’s online journal, "Earth’s Future." Editor Michael Ellis said the paper's importance stems from its focus on "the largely neglected" issue of flooding frequency. Nuisance floods are "occasionally costly to clean up, but never catastrophic or perhaps newsworthy,” Ellis said. The new study raises the question, he said, of when the nuisance becomes "a serious hazard." The study does not include Miami, arguable the U.S. city most vulnerable to sea-level rise, because NOAA tide stations there were destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Here are the top three risks facing the world

From the people at the World Economic Forum, the wonky global thinkers responsible for the yearly Davos conference, comes a new report that reinforces many of the world's greatest worries over the past year: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, public debt is at catastrophic levels and weather is getting weirder. For the second year in a row, the biggest global risks are income inequality, government debt and rising greenhouse gases, according to the panel of 1,000 industry and government experts the WEF interviewed. But the risks that will have the most impact are systemic financial failure, government debt and crises in the water supply: Two of those risks are interrelated. Although many say a total eurozone destruction is now not likely, the prospect of its collapse was sparked by one of the other WEF risks, a "failure to redress excessive government debt obligations," as Forum puts it. Though the risks mostly stayed the same from last year's report, respondents this year saw them as more likely to happen and as having a higher impact. "Two storms -- environmental and economic -- are on a collision course," said John Drzik, the head of Oliver Wyman Group and one of the experts surveyed for the report. Water risk made headlines during the drought that scorched countries around the world last summer, but it's actually a much broader issue that causes unique problems in different countries, according to Rob Kimball, an associate at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank. "For some communities it's as basic as drinking water availability, or unsustainable groundwater extraction leading to the intrusion of saltwater, particularly in coastal areas like those near California and the Gulf of Mexico" he said. "But drinking water is just a tiny bit of the puzzle - 70 percent of the water we consume around the world is used for agriculture." Elsewhere, water risks touches everything from shipping to electricity production. The Mississippi River, for example, is already so low after this year's drought that there's a chance cargo vessels soon won't be able to navigate a section of it, which could potentially affect even global commodity markets. In India, low rainfall reduced hydroelectric capacity and increased pressure on the electric grid, contributing to widespread blackouts over the summer. "It's a reminder that our huge global economy is still constrained by the limits of our natural resources," Kimball said. The report also quotes the IMF as singling out Greece, Japan and Italy, among other countries, for debt reduction, but it warns that austerity could also lead to the election of "rejectionist" governments who could lead to further economic paralysis. In Italy, this is playing out with the resurgence of Silvio Berlusconi, the prospect of which has caused widespread concern that a new era under the Bunga-Bunga-prone former prime minister would undo the economic good that Mario Monti orchestrated. Ongoing economic crises also distract governments from working on other, longer-term challenges, such as investment projects or climate change. "This persistent global economic fragility continues to divert our attention from longer-term solutions by...generating greater caution in use of scarce funds for strategic investment projects," the authors write. Meanwhile, "mismanagement of an aging population" is one risk that increased from last year in both likelihood and impact -- a sign of the challenges countless countries will face as their birth rates plummet. Even more depressingly, the Forum said most countries haven't made strides toward mitigating the risks. "There is a feeling that we are not making progress," Lee Howell, the report's editor, said at the launch of the report in London. "We are not seeing the state leadership necessary to tackle these risks." The report also mentions five "game-changers" world leaders should be on the lookout for. They mostly read like the ends of disaster movies, but they're still an interesting look at where we might be headed: Developed in partnership with the editors of _Nature_ , a leading science journal, the chapter on “X Factors” looks beyond the landscape of 50 global risks to alert decision-makers to five emerging game-changers: The findings show how much the world has changed since pre-recessionary 2007, when the most frequently cited risks were a breakdown of critical information infrastructure, chronic disease in developed countries, an oil price shock, a hard landing in China and an asset price collapse. Here's a matrix of all of the risks, based on how likely they are to occur in the next 10 years and how much impact they would have:

More ways to save the Chesapeake Bay

The Oct. 1 editorial “A market to save the bay” highlighted an important program with major potential benefits for helping to protect the Chesapeake Bay. As the Environmental Protection Agency’s program for controlling acid rain demonstrated, trading programs that allow for use of the most cost-effective pollution-control techniques can help achieve important environmental goals. For example, investing $1,000 in planting trees or switchgrass along rural streams could do 10 to 20 times as much to control excess nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment as would an equivalent investment in urban stormwater controls. This means it could also do 10 to 20 times as much to clean and protect the Chesapeake Bay and the surrounding rivers. Further, while the flexibility to purchase additional pollution-control reduction credits from farms is no panacea, it might offer the only affordable means of cutting pollution enough to protect our waterways and the living resources they support. We will also need to invest in adequate safeguards to ensure that local water quality is still protected and that these cost-effective investments are monitored and maintained. Fortunately, living shorelines or buffers composed of trees and switchgrass can be readily monitored. ****J. David Foster,** Chestertown, Md.** The writer is riverkeeper for the Chester River Association. As an analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency from 1974 to 1993, he helped develop the agency’s policy on emissions trading.

Water can be used in the interests of peace

The alarming use of water as a weapon by the Islamic State is sadly part of a greater trend: diminishing water resources as a source of manipulation and conflict [“For Islamic State, water is a weapon,” front page, Oct. 8]. In the Niger River Basin, where Boko Haram has gained influence, similar scarcities have been used to recruit those desperate for food or water. When extremist groups offer an alternative to starvation or thirst, those groups look awfully favorable to local populations, regardless of their views. As trends of drought and underdevelopment sweep through these and other basins, we must question whether violence can be prevented with water, too. Foreign development programs are often justified with direct economic impacts and health outcomes. But fending off extremist influence is yet another reason to help with infrastructure and agriculture in the developing world. Water is not just a weapon; it’s also a path to peace. ****Ricky Passarelli,** Springfield** The writer is an engineer with the Environmental Security Program at the Stimson Center.

Pot is becoming legal in more places, but we should drug test employees anyway

The movement to normalize the use of marijuana is growing across the United States. Nearly half of states now allow medical use of marijuana and, in November 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first places in the world to pass legislation legalizing the regulated production, sale and recreational use of marijuana.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now this movement is turning its sights on employer drug testing, arguing that, in an environment that is increasingly tolerant of marijuana use, testing for marijuana is outdated, irrelevant and, in some cases, even illegal. In Colorado, a medical marijuana user is suing Dish Network for firing him over a positive drug test, bringing the legality of such screening into question. Meanwhile, marijuana advocates are targeting drug-testing policies of major employers, including launching a petition to pressure the New York Times to trash its drug-testing policy. If successful, this movement will damage the safety and productivity of U.S. workplaces and take away one proven way to reduce substance abuse.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Workplace drug testing became commonplace in the 1980s as employers sought to reduce the negative effects of drug use. This practice has succeeded. After implementing drug testing programs, many employers have reported higher productivity, less absenteeism, lower employee turnover, and declines in workers’ compensation claims. In a 2011 poll of human resources managers, the number of employers reporting high absenteeism fell by half after implementing drug-testing programs. Nearly one in five reported improved productivity.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Further, employers are legally obligated to provide safe and healthy environments for their employees. Drug testing is a crucial part of achieving that goal. Post-accident testing helps identify the use of impairing substances, including marijuana, that causes accidents and injuries on the job. There is clear evidence of the short- and long-term adverse effects of marijuana use, including impairment related to memory, altered judgment, motor coordination, cognition, and even addiction. In chronic daily marijuana users, impairment in critical tracking and divided attention tasks are observed following three weeks of abstinence. **** For all of these reasons, marijuana and other illicit drug use is prohibited by many employers, including specifically under federal regulations for commercial drivers, airline pilots and train engineers. These issues are particularly important to safety sensitive roles, but substance abuse adversely affects all workplaces. The legalization of marijuana for medical and recreational use does not change these facts.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It is uncommon for an occasional user to be identified in random workplace drug testing. An analysis that I conducted showed that, in random workplace drug tests, about 52 percent of all positives will be daily drug users, 41 percent will be monthly drug users and only 7 percent will be annual drug users. While it is true that marijuana metabolites are retained in the body longer than alcohol and most other drugs, about 40 percent of people who smoke one or two marijuana joints at night test negative the next day and nearly all will test negative within five days. In contrast to an occasional smoker, marijuana can be detected in the urine of chronic smokers for several weeks after they stop smoking. Employer drug testing is an important tool in reducing drug abuse problems nationwide. **** Over 6.3 million Americans age 18 and older have an illicit substance use disorder and the large majority of these individuals are employed either full or part time. Employer drug testing helps identify Americans who need help curbing their dependence or chronic use and, in many cases, provides or directs them to treatment.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Some marijuana advocates argue that companies conducting drug tests in states that have legalized marijuana are at odds with the law. That’s not true. Marijuana sale and use remain illegal under federal law everywhere in the country. Federal law supersedes state law when they conflict. That being said, it is wise for employers to update their drug testing policies and procedures in the states with medical and/or recreational marijuana so that expectations for employees are clear.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Changes in state marijuana laws do not invalidate the accomplishments made over the last three decades to establish drug-free workplaces, improving workplace safety and employee health. While it’s true that drug testing has declined in recent years in an effort to cut business costs, more than half of employers in the U.S. continue to drug test their job candidates. That’s because these programs benefit both businesses and society. Stopping workplace drug testing for marijuana and other drugs of abuse would negatively affect the productivity and safety of the U.S. workforce. _ **Note:** This author’s bio has been updated to reflect his interest in a company that provides drug testing and employee assistance programs._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs and maybe go even further

A group of 22 medical experts convened by Johns Hopkins University and The Lancet have called today for the decriminalization of all nonviolent drug use and possession. Citing a growing scientific consensus on the failures of the global war on drugs, the experts further encourage countries and U.S. states to "move gradually toward regulated drug markets and apply the scientific method to their assessment."   "The goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production and trafficking of illicit drugs is the basis of many of our national drug laws, but these policies are based on ideas about drug use and drug dependence that are not scientifically grounded," said Commissioner Dr. Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a statement.  The commissioners cite research showing that "of an estimated 246 million people who used an illicit drug in the past year, 27 million (around 11%) experienced problem drug use, which was defined as drug dependence or drug-use disorders."   And beyond decriminalization, the commissioners recommend experimenting with the full legalization and regulation of certain types of drug use, as several U.S. states have done with marijuana. "Although regulated legal drug markets are not politically possible in the short term in some places, the harms of criminal markets and other consequences of prohibition catalogued in this Commission will probably lead more countries (and more U.S. states) to move gradually in that direction—a direction we endorse," they write.  Reformers are hoping that the upcoming General Assembly Special Session on drugs will mark a turning point in the drug war. But getting nearly 200 countries to agree on any change in direction will be a challenge. And early indications appear to be that negotiators are setting their sights low.

World Bank: The way climate change is really going to hurt us is through water

The most startling finding? The report suggests that by 2050, an inadequate supply of water could knock down economic growth in some parts of the world a figure as high as 6 percent of GDP, “sending them into sustained negative growth.” Regions facing this risk — which can at least partly be averted by better water management, the document notes — include not only much of Africa but also India, China and the Middle East.     The problem will be exacerbated by greater populations overall, and more demand for water due to increased needs in the electricity generation and agricultural sectors. But the impacts, the study found, will also be very uneven, with little projected economic harm to North America or Europe from water supply changes. “Growing populations, rising incomes, and expanding cities will converge upon a world where the demand for water rises exponentially, while supply becomes more erratic and uncertain,” the report says. It’s not the case that the world as a whole will have inadequate fresh water — it’s that some places will be fine but others won’t have enough, and there’s not much means of mass water redistribution over long distances. Rather, grapping with these looming water scarcity problems has to occur in specific regions, where it will be important to address water waste, misalloaction, and efficiency in water use — in other words, using the same amount of water for more diverse purposes or needs. That’s a crucial task, the report finds, due to staggering projected increases in fresh water demand. The report finds that in the next 30 years, “the global food system will require between 40 to 50 percent more water; municipal and industrial water demand will increase by 50 to 70 percent; the energy sector will see water demand increase by 85 percent; and the environment, already the residual claimant, may receive even less.” And when water shortages happen, the poor will inevitably be hit the hardest — when it comes to both food and drinking water, because they may not be able to purchase supplies from elsewhere to get them through hard times. What’s most new about the report, perhaps, is tying the problem of potential future water scarcity – which has been already much discussed in the past — to particularly dire economic impacts. “We will have expanding water deficits. When you do the analysis, it turns out that economic growth is a thirsty business,” Damania said. The report finds that water, or the lack thereof, can damage economies in multiple ways — ranging from cutting down business efficiencies, to harming the health of citizens, to spurring natural disasters. And the problem won’t be steady or chronic — there are likely to be sudden crises spurred by droughts or extreme weather events, such as floods. These, again, will hit unstable regions the hardest — and take a major economic toll. “When we have poverty, when we have division, when we have polarization, you add to that a water shock, something like a drought, this becomes a threat multiplier,” Damania said. If there’s good news, it’s that the report does find that resilience measures, such as low-hanging-fruit improvements to water infrastructure, can reduce the risks in many regions. “Some cities, even in arid areas, lose more water through leaking pipes than they deliver to households,” the report notes.

Drugged driving eclipses drunken driving in tests of motorists killed in crashes

For the first time, statistics show that drivers killed in crashes are more likely to be on drugs than drunk. Forty-three percent of drivers tested in fatal crashes in 2015 had used a legal or illegal drug, eclipsing the 37 percent who tested above the legal limit for alcohol, according to a report released Wednesday by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) and the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility. Of the drivers who tested positive for drugs, more than a third had used marijuana and more than 9 percent had taken amphetamines. “As drunken driving has declined, drugged driving has increased dramatically, and many of today’s impaired drivers are combining two or more substances,” said Ralph S. Blackman, president of the foundation, a nonprofit founded and funded by a group of distillers. The report is narrowly focused on fatal crashes. It shows that among fatally injured drivers with known test results, 2015 was the first time that drug use was more prevalent than alcohol use. Beyond that, however, it draws on other studies and statistics that create a complicated portrait of legal and illegal drug use nationwide. Every state bans driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The opioid epidemic — heroin use and the abuse of prescription drugs — is well established. In 2015, more than 33,000 people fatally overdosed on opioids, almost equal to the 35,095 people killed that year in all traffic crashes. The number of drivers who tested positive for drugs after dying in a crash rose from almost 28 percent in 2005 to 43 percent in 2015, the latest year for which data is available. Though the dates when each state passed a law vary, that period coincided with more-permissive laws covering the use of marijuana. Medical use of the drug is now allowed in 29 states and the District of Columbia; 17 states permit its use in some medical circumstances; use has been decriminalized in 21 states; and recreational use is allowed in eight states and the District. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised to reinvigorate the war on drugs, reversing an Obama administration policy that reduced prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Although the liberalization of marijuana laws and increase in drug-use fatalities might lead to an easy conclusion, the report cites European studies that found marijuana use slightly increased the risk of a crash, while opioids, amphetamines and mixing alcohol with drugs greatly increased the risk of a crash. Counterbalancing that assessment of crash risk is this stark statistic: In Colorado, marijuana-related traffic deaths increased by 48 percent after the state legalized recreational use of the drug. “Drugged driving is a complicated issue,” said Jim Hedlund, a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official who wrote the GHSA report. “The more we can synthesize the latest research and share what’s going on around the country to address drug-impaired driving, the better positioned states will be to prevent it.” Unlike the blood alcohol standard of 0.08, which often can be established at the scene of a crash, testing for drug use is more complex, usually requiring a blood test, and the effect of drug use can vary substantially among users. Surveys of regular marijuana users in Colorado and Washington state, which also has legalized recreational use, found that almost none of them thought marijuana use impaired their driving, while they believed drinking alcohol did. The challenge to police in attempting to enforce laws against drug-using drivers is compounded because many officers lack training to identify those under the influence of drugs, and delays in testing may allow the drug to metabolize so the results do not accurately measure the concentration in the driver’s system at the time of the incident. “As states across the country continue to struggle with drug-impaired driving, it’s critical that we help them understand the current landscape and provide examples of best practices so they can craft the most effective countermeasures,” said Jonathan Adkins, executive director of GHSA.

Ruth Patrick, ecology pioneer, dies at 105

Ruth Patrick, whose studies of freshwater ecology in the 1930s helped galvanize the later environmental movement and whose success in a profession dominated by men charted a course for other female scientists, died Sept. 23 at a retirement community in Lafayette Hill, Pa. She was 105. The Academy of Natural Sciences, a museum and research institution in Philadelphia now affiliated with Drexel University, announced the death but did not disclose the cause. She was associated with academy for nearly 80 years while also teaching science classes for more than three decades at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Patrick, who in 1996 received the nation’s highest award for scientific achievement, began focusing on ecology at a time when the dangers of pollution barely pierced the national consciousness. Women were so rare in the sciences that when she sought a job at the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1934 — the same year she received a doctorate in botany from the University of Virginia — she was told she would not be paid. She was also advised not to wear lipstick to work. It was about seven years before she earned a salary years at the academy. She became, in 1973, the first female chair of the academy’s board of trustees. “My great aim,” Dr. Patrick once told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “has been to be able to diagnose the presence of pollution and develop means of cleaning things up.” Her research on limnology — the study of freshwater rivers and lakes — meant wading into an estimated 850 rivers and streams worldwide. Her work drew scientific and political attention to the problem of water pollution, and she later became one of the early scientists to speak out about global warming. “She’s one of the few early women in limnology, and so she was a great role model — really a pioneer, when most universities didn’t even have female professors in the sciences,” said Deborah Bronk, the past president of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, which awards a prize named in Dr. Patrick’s honor. “She was also a real pioneer in using research findings and advocating for public change” in environmental causes. Dr. Patrick’s work led Congress to pass the 1972 Clean Water Act, which she helped write. Groundbreaking in its time, it remains the chief federal law focused on reducing and preventing water pollution. She advised Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan on environmental issues. Her chief contribution was identifying the significance of the diatom, now a key measure of water pollution. In the 1930s, when she was completing her doctoral research, Dr. Patrick was the first scientist to focus on this single-celled organism, eaten by other underwater creatures, that is present in almost every freshwater environment. Earlier scientists had simply measured chemical levels to describe the health of bodies of water. Dr. Patrick found that measuring the presence of the diatom, a simple and prevalent life form — and using a tool she invented called a diatometer — gave a much better picture of the health of the ecosystem’s life forms. The belief that biodiversity is the chief indicator of water health is now known as the Patrick Principle. “She was looking at this at a time long before the general public or the government was interested in matters of water pollution,” said Bob Peck, a senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences. “When the environmental crisis began to emerge in the 1970s, she was the dominant figure in the field of water pollution.” Ruth Myrtle Patrick was born Nov. 26, 1907, in Topeka, Kan., and raised in Kansas City, Mo. She took weekly nature walks with her father, a lawyer who had once aspired to a career in science. “I remember the feeling I got when my father would roll back the top of his big desk in the library and roll out the microscope,” she told an interviewer in 2004. “He would make slides with drops of the water samples we had collected, and I would climb up on his knee and peer in. It was miraculous, looking through a window at a whole other world.” At 7, she once recalled, her father gave her a microscope with the instruction: “Don’t cook. Don’t sew. You can hire people to do that. Read and improve your mind.” She was a 1929 graduate of Coker College in Hartsville, S.C. In 1931, she married married entomologist Charles Hodge IV, who, according to the Inquirer, once described life with Dr. Patrick as “like being married to the tail of a comet.” At the time of their nuptials, Dr. Patrick’s father made a request. “I would like you to let Ruth keep her name,” he said. “I want the name Patrick to amount to something in science.” Hodge died in 1985. Her second husband, Lewis H. Van Dusen Jr., died in 2004. Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Charles Hodge V of Fairway, Kan.; three stepchildren, Duncan Van Dusen of Bryn Mawr, Pa., Michael Van Dusen of Washington and Sally Johnson of Philadelphia; 15 grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren. From 1933 to 2003, Dr. Patrick published more than 200 papers and contributed to books. She taught botany and limnology at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 35 years. After studying the water quality near DuPont chemical plants, she became an adviser to the company on environmental issues and, in 1975, was named the first woman on its board of directors. At a White House ceremony in 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Science. Until she turned 97, Dr. Patrick worked five days a week at the Academy of Natural Sciences, whose limnology center is named in her honor. At 100, she still came in to her office to work on her multi-volume text “Rivers of the United States,” whose installments ran up to 900 pages. “Many of the things that we take for granted now, in terms water quality and water purity, would not be where they are without her,” Peck said. “Ruth Patrick always tried to apply what she was studying to broader social concerns and helped to make the work relevant. She thought that, ultimately, the reason for studying all this was to help to improve human life and the life of the natural world.”

This is Watergate on amphetamines

By a day’s end, recalling what happened just 24 hours earlier becomes challenging. You can attribute the pace of revelations to extraordinary journalism (blasted out by social media in a 24/7 news environment) and the flood of leaks that spill out faster that journalists and voters can soak them up. Moreover, uniquely in this scandal, the president himself cannot keep from spilling the beans in interviews and meetings (with the Russians, no less!).

IAAF will not lift the ban on Russian track athletes in time for Rio Games

Russia’s track and field team was barred Friday from competing in the Rio Olympics, perhaps the sharpest rebuke yet against doping on the sport’s biggest stage. The move by the International Association of Athletics Federations, its international governing body, was unprecedented — teams have been banned from the Olympics for political reasons, such as South Africa from 1964 to 1988 for its apartheid policy, but never doping — and widely praised among the sport’s leaders. Reeling from multiple reports of systemic, state-sponsored doping, Russian athletes were initially suspended by the IAAF in November. A five-member task force presented an update to the IAAF council Friday in Vienna and reported that Russia had failed to fully address its “deep-seeded culture” of doping. “It was not an easy decision to make today. . . . This is a sad day for everybody concerned,” IAAF President Sebastian Coe said at a news conference. “Any decision made today was going to be a sad day for our sport.” Rune Andersen, who chaired the IAAF task force, explained at a news conference that Russia has made progress since the initial suspension but has failed to fully address its cheating tolerance. “The head coach of the Russian athletics team and many of the athletes on that team appear unwilling to acknowledge the nature and extent of the doping problem in Russian athletics,” Andersen said, “and certain coaches and athletes appear willing to ignore the doping rules.” Russian athletes have faced myriad charges of wrongdoing in recent months, most recently in a World Anti-Doping Agency report that was released Wednesday, two days before the IAAF council meeting. The report detailed some of the measures Russian athletes have taken to avoid drug-testing in the months that followed the initial IAAF suspension, including one incident in which an “athlete used a container inserted inside her body (presumably containing clean urine).” “When she tried to use the container it leaked on to the floor and not into the collection vessel,” the report said. “The athlete threw the container into the trash which was retrieved by [a doping official]. The athlete also tried to bribe the [doping official].” The report found that many athletes failed to properly report their whereabouts for tests and that doping control officers often faced intimidation. In addition, some athletes would report their whereabouts as military cities, where “athletes know that special permission is needed to gain access,” the report stated, noting that “athletes provide this location even if they aren’t there, to deter test planning.” Doping allegations are among several issues plaguing the Olympics just seven weeks before the Opening Ceremonies in Brazil, which has tried to play down the outbreak of the Zika virus, economic and social unrest, cost overruns, crime, and pollution at the venues for water sports such as sailing. The IAAF did adopt a pair of rule changes Friday, however, that provide some wiggle room for Russian athletes. Andersen said those who “are not tainted by the Russian system” could apply for an exemption. He said that would affect any Russian athletes who have been subject to reliable testing outside of the Russian system. The organization also will give special consideration to “any athlete who has made an extraordinary contribution to the fight against doping,” which could include whistleblowers such as sprinter Yuliya Stepanova. In a statement Friday, Vitaly Mutko, the Russian Federation’s minister of sport, expressed disappointment in the IAAF’s decision and said the Russians “have nothing to hide and feel we had met the IAAF’s conditions for reentry.” “Clean athletes’ dreams are being destroyed because of the reprehensible behavior of other athletes and officials,” Mutko said. “They have sacrificed years of their lives striving to compete at the Olympics, and now that sacrifice looks likely to be wasted.” Russia traditionally fields a competitive track and field team. At the 2012 Games in London, Russia sent more than 100 track and field athletes, who claimed 18 medals in all. Two of those have already been stripped because of doping violations, and others could be in jeopardy. The Rio Games don’t formally begin until Aug. 5, but Olympic organizers have been trying to stem doping before a single event is contested. The International Olympic Committee has retested doping samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics and identified 55 men and women who could be banned from competing in Rio. At a meeting Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland, the organization will discuss whether individual athletes from banned teams should be granted exemptions, an IOC spokesman said. “We now appeal to the members of the International Olympic Committee to not only consider the impact that our athletes’ exclusion will have on their dreams and the people of Russia,” Mutko said in his statement Friday, “but also that the Olympics themselves will be diminished by their absence. The Games are supposed to be a source of unity, and we hope that they remain as a way of bringing people together.” Coe said he will attend the meeting and also emphasized that IAAF alone has the authority to determine athlete eligibility in international competitions. Andersen said given the breadth of doping in Russia, it would be difficult for the IAAF to grant exemptions. The line separating dirty and clean Russian athletes, he said, is a blurry one. “The systematic doping that has been ongoing in Russia, it’s difficult to pick the clean athletes,” Andersen said. “As you know, one or two or 100 negative tests does not mean an athlete is clean. History has not shown that that is the case.” The prolonged suspension was commended by most corners of the track and field world, a community that has grown accustomed to high-profile doping cases stretching back decades. Stephanie Hightower, president of USA Track and Field and a member of the IAAF council, said Friday’s decision “goes to the essence of our sport’s most critical issue.” “It is the only proper course of action given the compelling and powerful evidence presented to Council,” Hightower, who attended Friday’s meeting in Vienna, said in a statement. “We do not believe that every Russian athlete cheated, and it is unfortunate and regrettable that some may pay a penalty for the serious transgressions of their federation. Ultimately, Council chose to act with unanimity and strength to help rebuild the integrity of the sport and the public trust.” The U.S. Olympic Committee issued a statement calling the suspension a “step in the right direction.” “It gives a measure of hope to clean athletes that there are consequences not only for athletes who dope, but for countries which do not engage seriously in the fight against doping,” the organization said. Many Russian athletes, meanwhile, were stunned by the news. Pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva told TASS, Russia’s state-run news agency, that the decision was a violation of human rights. “I will not be silent. I will take measures,” she said. “I will appeal to the court of human rights. I will prove to IAAF and WADA that they have made the wrong decision. I will do it to demonstrate and so that everybody understands Russia will not keep quiet.”

From the Mississippi to the Ganges, river deltas are in major trouble

A river delta is, by definition, a place in flux — coastal land naturally sinks, and is naturally rebuilt by the flow of a vast river that carries in new sediment. Across the globe, from the Amazon to the Nile to the Yangtze, we humans rely on such deltas for the many benefits they bring — access to fisheries, good locations for shipping, and much else. But we don’t just rely on them — we change them. We dam rivers upstream and channelize them downstream – actions that reduce the flow of sediment and, thus, the growth of land. Meanwhile, we cut channels through wetlands and cause land to sink further by pulling lots of oil and gas and water out of it. Such changes have an insidious consequence: Even as they entice larger populations to live on deltas by providing jobs and the semblance of environmental stability, they also increase long-term vulnerability to storms and floods by exacerbating the land’s sinking. Meanwhile, global warming makes the whole dynamic worse because it introduces a huge arrow pointing in only one direction — sea level is going up, and up, and up. Now, a sweeping new study released in Science Thursday takes a comprehensive look at how much such factors are increasing the vulnerability of 48 major global river deltas, the home to 340 million people — including the Mississippi River delta, which lies between the city of New Orleans and the sea.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “We characterized the rate of change of risk in delta systems due to combined land subsidence, sea level rise, geophysical setting, and socio-economic capacity to protect themselves,” explains lead study author Zachary Tessler of the City University, who conducted the research with scholars from three additional universities. Here’s an image Tessler provided with the research, showing the loss of delta wetlands in Louisiana over the past four decades: The study used multiple datasets and indices to examine changing risks to river deltas based upon 1) their inherent risk of storms and floods; and 2) how much humans are exacerbating those risks by changing their landscapes in a way that causes land to sink, even as seas rise. Along the first axis, deltas range from the Orinoco in South America, which faces relatively few flooding and storm threats, to the Yangtzee and Han, where these risks are very high. When it comes to human perturbations of the system, meanwhile, river deltas range from the pristine Yukon in Alaska, which is relatively lowly populated and has been little changed by humans in a way that would make it more vulnerable (much of it is a wildlife refuge), to the Ganges-Brahmaputra of Bangladesh and India — home to over 100 million people, where human activities and sea level rise are pushing the risks forward dramatically.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Based on these two factors — how much human activities and sea level rise are changing a delta and worsening its plight, and how much it is exposed to storm and flood risks — the study found a complex tapestry of changing risks, depending on the delta. On the one hand, the Yukon wasn’t at much additional risk at all. “It’s definitely clear that some of these deltas are almost completely untouched, that tends to be at the high latitudes,” says Tessler. However, most of the deltas showed at least some increased risk, and some showed quite a lot of it. In particular, the heavily populated Krishna and Ganges-Brahmaputra deltas had the most rapidly growing risk of flooding related disasters. “They have…lots of dams, lots of development on the coastline, wetland loss — we expect the relative sea level rise that’s happening there to have a large impact on the risk outcomes of the communities,” Tessler says. Indeed, Bangladesh has historically been the home to the deadliest tropical cyclone (or hurricane) disasters known to history, including the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which struck this very delta, the Ganges-Brahmaputra, and caused 300,000 to 500,000 deaths.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But there’s another key factor involved in determining a given delta’s risks — a society’s wealth, which translates into its ability to protect itself. Thus, while the Mississippi River is heavily managed and has been changed nearly beyond recognition by humans, the delta also has a high level of artificially imposed resilience — with vast levees along much of the river to prevent flooding, not to mention New Orleans’ huge new hurricane protections.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A similar story can be told about the Rhine, heavily altered by humans but also the home to arguably the world’s most impressive flood protections, constructed by the Dutch.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “A high capacity for investment in risk-reducing technologies…is the primary reason that several wealthy, developed deltas today have relatively low risks,” the study found. But that may not always be the case. The research found that if the cost of building flood-defense infrastructure increases steadily over 100 years — as might be brought on, for instance, by rising energy prices — then the rich but heavily exploited deltas like the Mississippi would see a spike in vulnerability. In that scenario, a delta like the Mississippi “reverted back toward expectations based on geophysical hazards and anthropogenic change alone.” That’s a sobering message this year, as most observers of New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina are likely to look at its gigantic and costly hurricane protections and see them as a sign of reassurance. And they are — but Tessler is suggesting that it’s a little more complicated than that.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “If you want to maintain your [level of] risk, in light of increasing cost, you need to spend increasing amounts of money,” he says. “And while you’re doing that, you’re not addressing the fact that land subsidence is increasing. So your costs are rising.” Deltas, after all, have been doing their thing for thousands upon thousands of years — flooding, washing in sediment, rebuilding land. But we changed the system — meaning that simply building higher, on sinking land, may not be enough of a sustainable solution.

Pilots killed in crashes since 1990 show bump in legal, illegal drugs, study says

Tests of pilots killed in plane crashes over more than two decades show an increasing use of legal and illegal drugs, including some that could impair flying, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board. The study examined toxicology reports for almost 6,700 pilots killed in crashes from 1990 to 2012. Not only did the share of pilots testing positive for a drug increase, but the share of pilots who tested positive for multiple drugs increased as well. Pilots testing positive for at least one drug increased from 9.6 percent to 39 percent, while positive tests for two drugs rose from 2 percent to 20 percent and three drugs from zero to 8.3 percent. Over the same period, new drugs were coming into use and the U.S. population was aging, creating a greater demand for drugs. The toxicology tests “reflect trends in the general population and likely indicate a significant increase in drug use” by pilots as well, the study said. But the share of accidents the board has investigated in which impairment from a drug was found to be a factor hasn’t increased appreciably, the report said. Since 1990, the NTSB has cited pilot impairment due to drugs as a cause or a contributing factor in about 3 percent of fatal civil aviation accidents. Acting NTSB Chairman Christopher A. Hart said the board “is concerned about possible safety implications of increased drug use in all modes of transportation.” He called the report “an important first step toward understanding those implications.” The tests revealed increased pilot use of all kinds of drugs — including drugs that could impair a pilot’s functioning — as well as drugs used to treat potentially impairing conditions such as seizure disorders and psychiatric illness. The most common drug found in the tests was an antihistamine that causes drowsiness and is a key ingredient in many over-the-counter medications for allergies, colds and sleep. Sedating antihistamines were found in 9.9 percent of pilots tested during the last five years studied, up from 2.1 percent of the cases during the previous examined years. The share of pilots testing positive for illegal drugs was small, but increased from 2.3 percent to 3.8 percent. The study attributed the increase mostly to greater marijuana use in the past 10 years. Mary Pat McKay, the board’s chief medical officer, said the study was limited to aviation because similarly comprehensive drug-test data doesn’t exist for fatal highway, rail and maritime accidents. But it is likely there are similar trends in those modes as well, she said. The NTSB voted to issue a safety alert to pilots, warning of the risk of impairment from many over-the-counter drugs. The board also issued several recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration and state governments aimed at better communication of drug risks to pilots and operators in all transportation modes. More than 9 out of 10 of the pilots tested were private rather than commercial pilots, and 98 percent were male. The average age of pilots killed also increased markedly, from 46 years old in 1990 to 57 in 2012. The average age of pilots killed was five to 15 years older than the general population of active pilots. **— Associated Press  **

Promote the good — not the bad — about the Potomac River

The May 15 Metro article “Potomac tops list of imperiled U.S. rivers” unfortunately depicted our nation’s (and maybe the world’s) finest urban wilderness river as the country’s worst waterway ecologically. The advocacy group American Rivers cited all the river’s problems in the apparent hope that the revelations will help in the effort to preserve the Clean Water Act. Certainly this is laudable. But perhaps emphasizing all the good that the act has done for the Potomac and other rivers would send a better message to Congress as it debates the act’s future. Simply put, the Clean Water Act is working, and the Potomac is much cleaner than it was before the act was passed 40 years ago. There has been a resurgence of plant and animal life along its banks. This year, walkers along Billy Goat Trail have had the pleasure of viewing a nesting pair of bald eagles. Last autumn, I saw three otters splashing in the river not far from Cabin John. Lush grasses are sprouting up alongside Stubblefield Falls, a favorite hunting spot for the river’s healthy population of northern water snakes. Resident rockfish abound near Fletcher’s Cove, and this spring “a great number of largemouth bass were caught right out in front of the boathouse,” according to Dan Ward, who has been working at the cove for 30 years and writes an online fishing report. He also said he has “never before” seen such a variety of birds near the boathouse. The message to Congress should be that its decades-long effort to clean the Potomac and other waterways has been worthwhile, although there is still much to do. ****Sean Kelly,** Bethesda**

The myth of marijuana as a gateway drug

Thanks for reporting on the disparate levels of enforcement of marijuana laws across the country [“Entrenched in the war on weed,’’ front page, June 22]. Police call marijuana a gateway to hard drugs, implying that their tough enforcement of prohibition prevents problems with harder drugs down the line. Research does not support this idea. The vast majority of marijuana users have never even seen heroin or crack cocaine. A small subset of people develop problems with hard drugs, usually as a result of life stressors and a genetic predisposition to these troubles. Some of them use marijuana before they use hard drugs; many do not. Enforcing harsh penalties against marijuana users does not prevent problems with hard drugs; it simply wastes the time of law enforcement officers, clogs our court systems and drains tax dollars that could be spent on proven prevention programs. ****Mitch Earleywine** , Albany, N.Y.** The writer is chair of the executive board of NORML, which aims to reform marijuana laws.

Molly, a form of MDMA or ecstasy, can cause fatal reactions

In high school, Shelley Goldsmith was a student council president and tennis team captain. She’d won an academic scholarship to the University of Virginia, had raised money for the American Heart Association and baked cupcakes for cancer patients when her dad was going through chemotherapy. The Abington, Va., teen also loved music. In August 2013, Goldsmith, then 19, attended a rave concert at a club in Washington where she took some Molly, a popular recreational drug. After a few hours of hard dancing, she collapsed. She died several hours later at a hospital. A purified version of ecstasy, or MDMA, Molly is commonly thought to be a safe drug, and it has been popularized by such singers as Miley Cyrus, Kanye West and Rihanna. It produces a high that users say allows them to dance tirelessly, be more open and uninhibited emotionally, and experience euphoria and heightened sensory awareness. The Drug Enforcement Administration says no other drug is quite like MDMA, creating amphetamine-like energized feelings and mild mescaline-like hallucinations. In the 1970s, MDMA was prescribed as an aid to psychotherapy to improve patients’ insights about their problems and enhance their ability to communicate with their therapists. In 1985, as the drug began showing up in clubs and other nontherapeutic settings, the DEA grew worried about abuse and banned it. Recently, though, clinical trials of MDMA have been approved for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety in terminal cancer patients and social anxiety in adults with autism. Some have shown promising results. The Molly sold on the street often is laced with other substances — such as acetaminophen, amphetamines and ketamine, a compound used in anesthesia — that can be deadly in large enough doses, according to an NYU Langone Online Journal of Medicine article. Molly typically works in about an hour, and its effects last a little more than seven hours. In addition to causing users to feel good, it can cause paranoia, anxiety, depression, loss of appetite, dry mouth, hot and cold flushes and teeth grinding. (See sidebar about Molly’s effects.) In February, 10 Wesleyan University students and one guest at the Connecticut college were hospitalized, some in critical condition, according to Mark Neavyn, director of toxicology at Hartford Hospital, who was in the emergency room when some of the young people came in. Although they had taken what they thought was Molly, Neavyn said, blood and urine tests suggested they had actually ingested other chemicals and drugs. All of the hospitalized students eventually were released. Two Wesleyan students, Zachary Kramer, 21, of Bethesda, and Eric Longeran, 22, of Rio de Janeiro, face federal charges, including for distributing synthetic drugs. With its friendly-girl-next-door name and its embrace by music culture, Molly began to grow in popularity beginning in about 2004, according to figures from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. A 2013 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that annual estimated visits to hospital emergency departments by people 21 and younger involving the drug increased 128 percent — from 4,460 to 10,176 — between 2005 and 2011, though 2010 may have been the peak. “We like to party dancing with Molly/ Doing whatever we want,” sings Miley Cyrus. “Something about Mary, she gone off that Molly/ Now the whole party is melted like Dalí,” raps Kanye West. From Rihanna: “Palms rise to the universe/ As we moonshine and Molly/ Feel the warmth, we’ll never die/ We’re like diamonds in the sky.” Patil Armenian, an emergency medicine and medical toxicology physician at the University of California at San Francisco/Fresno, says Molly “is now a mainstream drug, not just a club drug. It is all over college campuses, high schools . . . used by those in their 30s and 40s. It was once thought of as a middle-class Caucasian drug, but we are seeing it in the African American population as well.” Armenian, whose main area of research is MDMA and designer drugs, said that a huge problem is that the various pills and powders being sold on the street as Molly have unknown strength and chemical composition so that anytime people use it, they are taking a huge risk. “We have seen terrible outcomes even with pure MDMA,” Armenian said. “The poison is in the dose. Everything is poisonous if you take enough of it.” Goldsmith’s mother, Dede Goldsmith, said a toxicology report found that her daughter’s death was the result of ingesting pure MDMA. Armenian and Neavyn said Molly is easily obtained, often under the label of research chemicals on what is called the dark Web — sites that conceal their addresses and are reachable only through special browsers. Working with a DEA agent to avoid legal problems, Armenian said, she was able to buy as part of her research a chemical compound very similar to pure MDMA, paying for it via PayPal. “It was impressive how easy it was,” she said. When people have died after taking Molly, Armenian said, it has usually been due to serotonin syndrome, which causes agitation, rapid heart rate, high fever, high blood pressure, loss of muscle coordination, seizures and unconsciousness. Anyone taking antidepressants is at greater risk because the drugs increase the effects of serotonin, which become magnified by MDMA. Andrew Bazos, founder of CrowdRx, which provides emergency medical services at many summer concerts, says the combination of music, drugs, heat and nonstop dancing is a perfect storm for trouble. “With dropping sodium levels, electrolyte imbalance and increased body temperature, it creates an inhospitable environment for the heart and brain to live happily and normally,” said Bazos, who is also a physician at the New York University School of Medicine. Molly fools the body’s temperature-regulating system to stop functioning properly, he said, allowing a concertgoer to overheat to a dangerous extent. CrowdRx EMTs are constantly on the lookout for people having trouble walking, thinking and answering questions. In addition, they screen those in trouble for increased temperature. CrowdRx purchased a device (I-stat) that measures electrolyte levels on-site so that if necessary someone can get IV fluids right away to correct electrolyte levels. They also have cooling baths to treat those with rising temperature. Bazos and Neavyn say anyone tempted to enhance the concert experience by using Molly should think twice. These are chemicals developed in laboratories for research, Neavyn said. “When you start experimenting with research chemicals, even the most skilled chemists can get it wrong, You just don’t know what you are getting when you take that capsule or snort that line,” he said. “That one bad choice can be your last choice.” From a National Institute on Drug Abuse summary about MDMA: **Reported undesirable effects:** Anxiety, restlessness, irritability, sadness, impulsiveness, aggression, sleep disturbances, lack of appetite, thirst, reduced interest in and pleasure from sex, significant reductions in mental abilities. **Potential adverse health effects:** Nausea, chills, sweating, involuntary jaw clenching and teeth grinding, muscle cramping, blurred vision, marked rise in body temperature (hyperthermia), dehydration, high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney failure, arrhythmia. **Symptoms of MDMA overdose:** High blood pressure, faintness, panic attacks, loss of consciousness, seizures. _Berger is a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter:@Msjournalist._

Eye-opening stories on rechargeable battery production

Thank you for the excellent research and journalism that produced the front- page articles “The cobalt pipeline” [Oct. 2] and “In your phone, in their air” [Oct. 3]. They were beautifully done exposés that opened my eyes to the consequences of the production and consumption of the lithium-ion batteries that power many of our electronic devices. I was unaware of the challenges of obtaining minerals found in such batteries. My hope is that consumers will consider the global effects when making their next purchases. The companies that we buy from should make concerted efforts to purchase these products from reputable businesses that deliberately keep the impact of their production to a minimum and endorse safety in acquisition and production. ****W. Diana Tai** , Palmyra, Va.**

Apparently, the once-feared snakehead is just another fish in the Potomac

I interviewed Odenkirk regarding snakeheads in the Potomac River, and his interview, lightly edited, is below:     In the areas where they have been longest (e.g., around Mount Vernon), numbers seem to be declining in most Virginia creeks. I am fairly certain that a high level of exploitation (both commercial and recreational), which encompasses the huge increase in bow fishing, due to this fish, has helped suppress numbers.

More than half of adults misuse medications, study finds

More than half of adults and 44 percent of children who were drug-tested by a national clinical laboratory last year misused their prescription medications, according to a study released Monday by Quest Diagnostics.  “These are situations where the patient is placing their life at risk,” said Leland McClure, a director with Quest, which is the nation’s largest provider of clinical laboratory testing. The rate of misuse identified by the study might skew higher than what would be found in the general U.S. population. Some patients were tested because their health providers determined there was a “high probability” of them mismanaging medications, the study said. The study also identified the drugs most often misused by patients depending on their age: amphetamines for youth 17 and under, but benzodiazepines and anti-anxiety medications for adults 25 and older, followed by opioid painkillers. The study provided regional results for adults. The highest rate of misuse, nearly 66 percent, occurred in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. The lowest rate of misuse, about 51 percent, took place in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. This fifth year of the prescription drug study made use of more than 3 million test results. The testing checked for 44 drugs in 2015, up from 26 drugs in 2010. For the first time, the latest analysis also included 155,646 heroin test results, which showed that nearly one-third of patients tested positive for benzodiazepines. Both heroin and that group of medications lower respiratory rates. When they are combined, patients can stop breathing, have heart attacks and die, McClure said. And those combinations are happening with an “alarming magnitude,” he added.

Here’s what Florida’s massive toxic algae bloom looks like from space

By now, you may have seen pictures of the foul-smelling, tourist-repelling, guacamole-thick algae that has been spreading along some South Florida waterways, including along the state’s “Treasure Coast.”   According to NASA, the algae bloom that grew this spring covered roughly 33 square miles of Lake Okeechobee. The conditions that gave rise to the bloom have persisted ever since, and have been blamed for affecting water quality downstream all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.  How did the algae bloom spread far beyond the shores of Lake Okeechobee? In part, it’s because the Army Corps of Engineers, which monitors water levels in the lake, had to make a decision as water levels continued to rise from huge amounts of rainfall. The Corps discharged excess water from the lake into rivers and estuaries that lead to the coast in order to avoid putting thousands of people and the towns they live in near the lake at risk of life-threatening flooding. That discharge flowed through the St. Lucie Canal on the lake’s eastern side into the Atlantic Ocean near Stuart, Fla. With it came the hideous algae that state officials are now scrambling to contain. Last week, Gov. Rick Scott (R) declared a state of emergency in multiple counties after algae blooms appeared in local waterways. On Wednesday, Scott vowed to push state legislators to spend millions to fight the bloom, which residents have described as smelling like “a hundred dead animals.” He also appealed to President Obama to declare a federal emergency in the area, saying that the blooms have caused “havoc to our environment.”  The algae and their toxins can disrupt ecosystems, choking the oxygen out of waterways and threatening fish, birds and other wildlife. It also can present risks to human health. Exposure to the slimy goop can cause skin irritation, nausea, vomiting and, in severe cases, liver problems.

What we’re doing to the environment may be costing us our drinking water

The whole region wins when we improve the Chesapeake Bay

_Daniel Sze, a member of the Falls Church City Council, is the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Chesapeake Bay and Water Resources Policy Committee chairman._ When you think of the Chesapeake Bay, maybe you imagine a weekend away sailing or fishing, exploring lighthouses or enjoying crabs or rockfish. Investments in the health of the bay watershed ensure that these things can be enjoyed by all. But you don’t have to cross the Bay Bridge to see these investments at work. Consider our own local gems, the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. These rivers and area streams are also being cleaned up thanks to bay restoration efforts, making metropolitan Washington a better place to live, work and play. Aquatic vegetation and native species such as the American shad are rebounding. Bald eagles are again nesting along our rivers. Harmful algal blooms aren’t threatening the Potomac, the primary source of drinking water for millions in this region. Residents, employers and tourists are drawn to our waterways, as is evident by the redevelopment of the District’s Southwest Waterfront, the boom at National Harbor in Prince George’s County and the restoration of the Four Mile Run area in Alexandria and Arlington. These accomplishments have been decades in the making. Last year, the bay received a better grade on its annual report card than it had in more than 15 years, but there is much work to be done. The Chesapeake Bay watershed is vast, so progress has been possible only because of federal, state and local partnerships. Improvements are largely thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay restoration program, with the support of 20 other federal programs, six states and the District, 1,800 localities, 27 academic institutions and 60 organizations. The bay is only as healthy as the waterways that flow into it, so restoration work also includes investments by local governments, water utilities, companies and residents. Wastewater treatment plants, including Alexandria Renew Enterprises, have been upgraded and are pioneering methods of energy recovery, wastewater byproduct recycling and innovative financing. DC Water uses “green” century bonds to help finance its Clean Rivers Project, including building enormous tunnels that capture stormwater and wastewater for treatment. Local governments are also exploring innovative ways to reduce stormwater runoff via permeable pavement and retention gardens, among other actions. In my own city of Falls Church, two streams, Pearson and Coe branches, were restored from a channeled or piped creek to a more natural habitat. These projects improve water quality, and we all enjoy these stream valley parks that have been brought back to life. Green infrastructure jobs are being created, too. These investments are paying off, but we’re at a crucial stage. Local governments and water utilities will continue to do their part, but as a key player in this region, the federal government must also do its part. If federal funding for the bay is reduced or eliminated, we will lose the primary glue holding the many partners together, and our waters will get worse. Federal involvement ensures that all partners will be at the table for future planning. Everyone wins when we work together for clean water. **Read more about this issue:** J. Charles Fox and Jeff Corbin: The leaders we elect will seal the Chesapeake Bay’s fate Hedrick Belin and Ed Merrifield: Recipe for a healthy Potomac The Post’s View: Mr. Pruitt’s tepid commitment to clean up the Chesapeake Bay Chip Bowling: Farmers can help clean up the Chesapeake The Post’s View: The Trump administration’s attack on the Chesapeake Bay

Salt from icy roads is contaminating North America’s lakes

In the 1940s, Americans found a new way to love salt. Not simply for sprinkling on food — we’d acquired a taste for the mineral long before that — but for spreading on roads and sidewalks. Salt became a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.  Extrapolating that finding for all of North America, at least 7,770 lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels — a likely underestimate, the researchers said.   Each lake in the report had chloride measurements going back 10 years or more, was at least four hectares in size (about nine football fields or larger) and was in a state that regularly salted its roads during winter. The study authors also analyzed what percentage of the lake was surrounded by an impervious surface. This could be any combination of roadways, sidewalk pavement, boat launches or other hard surfaces. Impervious surfaces, critically, allow dissolved salt to slide into lakes rather than soaking into soil. If at least 1 percent of the surface circling a lake was impervious, the lake was at risk of high chloride concentrations, the environmental scientists found.  The scientists could not directly measure how much of the chloride came from road salt. But previous research indicated that agriculture, water softeners and other sources played only minimal roles. “Road salt is the major driver for chloride loading,” Dugan said.  Lakes are generally less susceptible than streams to changes like salinization. They may also serve as sources of drinking water.   If current trends continue through 2050, 14 of the lakes studied would exceed the EPA's “aquatic life criterion concentration” of 230 milligrams per liter, the study authors predict. Another 47 would have a chloride concentration above 100 milligrams per liter. “Right now it's about ecosystems and biota,” Gibbs said, meaning animal and plant life. “It is kind of alarming. Ultimately, we're looking at a human health issue.” The average water treatment system will not remove dissolved elements like chloride ions from water. “You can’t filter out these salts,” Kaushal said.  “I think it should be listed as a primary contaminant,” just like potential pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorous, he said. Changing our salty ways, though, may not be simple. “About 10 years ago, I was asked by a state senator in Maryland to testify on a road salt bill,” he said. “And when he presented that, all of the other senators laughed at him.”  “We also are experiencing changes in the frequency and intensity of ice storms and snowstorms,” Weathers said. “It's clearly a case where science can and should be used to help guide management decisions.” Even if we curb our enthusiasm for road salt, it will take some time for the environment to respond. In the latter half of the 20th century, Germany decreased the amount of road salt it used. But the country’s lakes only recently began to show lower salinity levels. “There’s a lag after stopping laying down salt — a lot of salt is stored in soils,” Dugan said. “It’s like a reservoir of salt.” Individual business and property owners are responsible, in some cases, for up to half of all road salt used, Dugan said.

Federal marijuana smuggling is declining in the era of legal weed

It may seem as if the country is drowning in cheap, potent Colorado weed. But federal datasets tell a more complicated story: Nationwide, federal marijuana trafficking offenses are on the decline.  "The number of marijuana traffickers rose slightly over time until a sharp decline in fiscal year 2013 and the number continues to decrease," the report says. Meanwhile, trafficking in other drugs, notably meth and heroin, appears to be on the rise. Now, these numbers don't necessarily contradict reports that Colorado weed is making its way elsewhere. "The vast majority of marijuana-related arrests and prosecutions are made by local and state authorities," Beau Kilmer, a drug policy researcher with the RAND Corp., said in an email. The USSC data tracks only federal offenses, so even if state and local cops are seeing more marijuana moving between borders, you wouldn't expect that to show up here. But the USSC's numbers do show that at the federal level, marijuana trafficking is becoming less of a problem. It's not clear why this is happening. Legalization could be reducing demand for black market sales, state prosecutors could have changed how they charge defendants, or there could be another explanation altogether. USSC says their data doesn't provide enough information to draw a conclusion. "The Commission tracks data collected and reported by the federal courts regarding federal convictions, without regard to changes in state laws or practices," said Christine Leonard, Director of Legislative and Public Affairs at the USSC, in an email. Kilmer says there are three major variables that affect the number of trafficking arrests: "1) efforts made by law enforcement, 2) efforts made by the smugglers to conceal the contraband, and 3) the amount of contraband being shipped. Thus, there could be multiple explanations for the decrease at the federal level." But he agrees that the USSC data doesn't point to which of these are behind the decline in marijuana trafficking offenses. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which enforces federal drug trafficking laws, did not respond to questions about the data. There's no doubt that some marijuana from places such as Colorado and Washington is being illegally sent elsewhere. But if this were truly a serious, nationwide problem, you'd expect federal marijuana trafficking offenses to be rising. Instead, they're falling. This suggests that concerns about interstate marijuana smuggling could be overblown.

These are the U.S. Navy riverine command boats that Iran just ‘took into custody’

While details are sparse, two U.S. Navy riverine command boats have been “taken into custody” by the government of Iran, the Pentagon said Tuesday. An Iranian state-run news outlet reported that 10 U.S. sailors had been “arrested” even though Iranian and U.S. officials said that none of the sailors were harmed and that they would be released promptly. It is unclear how the boats ended up in Iranian hands, though officials have stated that one of the boats broke down very close to Iranian territorial waters and after drifting for a short time both were picked up by Iranian forces. Riverine command boats or RCBs, are actually Swedish CB-90s and are a type of fast attack craft. In a number of pictures released by the U.S. Navy, the boats are outfitted with a number of light, medium and heavy weapons including .50 caliber heavy machine guns and GAU-19 miniguns. Approximately 50 feet long, the CB-90s can reach speeds up to 40 knots on the water, according to the Swedish Navy. RCB’s can carry contingents of infantry and special operation forces and are often crewed by sailors in Riverine squadrons, known by some as River Rats. The riverine force came of age in the Vietnam War in what was then known as the Brown Water Navy. In the 1960s and early 1970s boats such as Patrol Boat, River (from ‘Apocalypse Now’ fame) and Swift Boats were the River Rats vessels of choice.

Manassas City Council to consider Lake Manassas access

The question of whether to allow public access to Lake Manassas for fishing and boating is about to return to the Manassas City Council. The council’s Finance Committee on Wednesday discussed a staff recommendation to spend $44,900 to study potential risks to the city’s water supply if the lake were opened to the public for recreational purposes. The staff also proposed creating a task force to work with a consultant on the study. Although a majority of the committee opposed funding the study and forming the task force, Mayor Harry J. “Hal” Parrish II (R) agreed to a request from committee chairman Marc T. Aveni (R) to forward the matter to the full council for its consideration. Parrish said the council will take up the issue Nov. 24. The city-owned lake supplies drinking water to about 100,000 residents of Manassas, Manassas Park and Prince William County, officials said. To protect the drinking water supply, the city eliminated public access to the lake in the 1990s. It banned boating in 2004. The council voted in September to have staff members explore options for opening the lake for recreation, including financial, operational, environmental and security issues. Tony Dawood, deputy director of public works and utilities, said that staff members recommended a study to address concerns about the safety and security of the water supply before considering other operational and financial issues, which include securing public access to the lake and involving other partners in the project. The appropriation of $44,900 for the study would come from the water fund balance, he said. Dawood said that several people agreed to serve on the task force, including Glenn Moglen and Thomas Grizzard, the current and former directors of the Occoquan Water Monitoring Laboratory; and James Schornick and Richard Milligan, members of the City of Manassas Utility Commission. “There’s been a lot said about the safety and security of that lake and . . . I think much of it is based on outdated or incorrect information,” Aveni said. Council Member J. Steven Randolph (I) said he was reluctant to take any action that might jeopardize the city’s water supply. “Water is a necessity,” Randolph said. “You have to have it, not only for the City of Manassas, but a great part of Manassas Park and parts of Prince William County. “I understand the desire to open it up for other uses, but I feel like, even [with] a few weeks left, I still have this responsibility . . . to the citizens, to do what I think is right,” said Randolph, who will retire from the council at the end of the year. “And I don’t think at this point we need to move forward with this.” Aveni countered, saying, “If we’re going to say the lake is closed, then I would want a report justifying why the lake was closed from a water quality and security position. We don’t have that right now.” Although council member Mark D. Wolfe (R) joined Randolph in opposing funding for the study, with only Aveni favoring it, Aveni asked Parrish whether he would schedule the issue for the full council to decide. “I think the most important thing that the City Council can do with regard to Lake Manassas is protect it from any sort of problems, whether it be terrorism, safety and security, or [a] challenge to the water system itself,” Parrish said. “So my concern is, what’s it going to cost the citizens of Manassas?” Parrish said. “Because if the government opens it, there’s going to be a cost. . . . I’m thinking about citizens of Manassas, because they’re the ones that are likely to have to pay for it.” Barnes is a freelance writer. ****

The Potomac needs the protection the Clean Water Act provides

Regarding the July 9 editorial “Clear rules for clean water”: Having grown up in Great Falls, the Potomac River has always been important to me. I love to spend days walking along the river and watching kayakers attempt the falls, though I’ve never dared to do it. Unfortunately, loopholes in the Clean Water Act have put the Potomac River at risk. Fifty-seven percent of streams in Virginia and 59 percent in Maryland are vulnerable to toxic pollution; many of them feed into the Potomac. The river provides drinking water for me and more than four million others. We need to close these loopholes. The Environmental Protection Agency’s new plan would do just that. By restoring Clean Water Act protections to these streams, this plan can protect the Potomac. I urge the EPA to finalize its rule, and restore Clean Water Act protections to all of Virginia’s waterways. ****Erin Hodge** , Great Falls**

Coal is a dying industry

Regarding the March 24 letter “Coal has a role” by Betsy Monseu, chief executive of the American Coal Council: Coal is a dying industry, as I’m sure Ms. Monseu knows, for many reasons, including automation, competition and pollution. The stream protection rule, not the stream rule, as Ms. Monseu called it, was common-sense legislation designed to bar coal companies from dumping mine waste into streams, effectively killing them. Waterways are interconnected and are the source of our drinking water. Clean water also has a direct economic value, via recreational and economic activities that occur on the water. Instead of trying to support the last gasp of a dying industry, we should work to help coal miners retrain, increase economic development in these areas and work toward clean, alternative energy solutions. ****Judy M. Thomas** , Mechanicsville**

Md. police speak out against drug-decriminalization bill

Maryland lawmakers heard conflicting testimony Tuesday on whether the state would benefit from eliminating criminal penalties for low-level narcotics possession, with some witnesses claiming the change would encourage more drug use, while others said it would put addicts where they belong — in treatment. The discussion occurred during the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on a bill that would decriminalize low-level possession of seven common drugs: Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, MDMA, LSD, methadone and amphetamine. Under the legislation, holding small amounts of those controlled substances would result in a civil fine of up to $500, although distributing narcotics would still be a criminal offense. Del. Dan K. Morhaim (D-Baltimore County), who sponsored the legislation, acknowledged that his proposal would sound radical to many people at first. But he said the state needs to focus on treatment rather than imprisonment. He called the nation’s so-called war on drugs “madness,” saying it has led to mass incarceration, higher levels of addiction and deaths from gang violence. Sara N. Love, public-policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, testified on behalf of Morhaim’s bill. “We believe this is a good first step into shifting drug policy to where it belongs -- in the health-care arena,” she said. Law-enforcement officials testified against the measure, saying it would do little to reduce addiction or diminish the drug trade. Maryland State Police Lt. Andy Johnson, who worked much of his career in undercover narcotics operations and drug interdiction, said the bill would have a negative impact. “We’ve identified these drugs as controlled dangerous substances for a reason — they’re dangerous substances,” he said. “The dangers associated with decriminalization is that it gives the green light to the younger generation to begin using, which ultimately leads to a higher rate of addiction.” Morhaim, an emergency-room physician who said he regularly treats overdose patients, has also proposed legislation that would require hospitals to make addiction counselors available at all times and develop plans for transferring drug users to appropriate detoxification and rehabilitation centers. His decriminalization measure defines low-level possession as up to 10 grams of marijuana; 10 pills of MDMA; 2 grams of cocaine; 1 gram of heroin, amphetamine, or methadone; and 0.0015 grams of LSD.

Review SWAT team training and equipment use

In his Nov. 1 op-ed, “Time to call in the SWAT team reform crew,” Joshua D. Filler argued for the improvement of our nation’s special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams in law enforcement. I agree with his call for a review of policies and procedures in order to achieve one standard of SWAT training and equipment use. The purpose of tactical law enforcement is to improve the likelihood of safely resolving critical incidents in which the well-being and security of the public is at stake. Absent proper training and equipment, law enforcement agencies risk using their tactical operations teams inappropriately, perhaps resulting in the loss of life and property and creating the potential for public mistrust. Federal programs, such as grants awarded by the Department of Homeland Security, provide law enforcement agencies the equipment necessary to improve public safety and domestic security. The National Tactical Officers Association welcomes an improved oversight process within those programs, as well as exploring standardization and mandatory training requirements. We look forward to continuing to work with Congress to identify the proper balance between reform and the very real needs of our nation’s law enforcement professionals. ****Mark Lomax** , Doylestown, Pa.** The writer is executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association.

Barge industry bears the cost of modernizing U.S. waterways

Steven Pearlstein’s Sept. 7 Business column, “That’s no way to end crony capitalism,” unfairly attacked the barge industry as the recipient of corporate welfare. Some facts: ●Modernization of inland waterways is financed through a diesel fuel charge paid by about 300 towboat operators. That fee pays for 50 percent of new construction and major rehabilitation of this transportation system, the most cost-competitive option for bulk commodities. ●Sixty percent of the nation’s export-bound grain is transported on inland waterways. Farmers depend on an efficient water-transport system to compete and win against foreign producers. The waterways are vital to our manufacturing sectors and to the construction industry. ●More than a half-million U.S. family-wage jobs depend on ports and inland waterways. ●Consumers benefit from transportation cost savings made possible by the inland waterways. Shippers save $21.54 per ton of cargo over other modes — that’s $12.5 billion annually. Many industries benefit from our nation’s waterways — recreation, hydropower, national security, water supply, flood control and navigation — yet barge operators are the only waterway users who pay for the system’s modernization. We need all transportation modes for keen — not crony — capitalism. ****Michael J. Toohey** , Arlington** The writer is president and chief executive of the Waterways Council.

Chesapeake waters warming, study finds, posing challenges for ailing bay

The Chesapeake Bay’s waters are warming up, in some places rising more rapidly even than the region’s air temperatures, a new University of Maryland study finds. If unchecked, it could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsen fish-suffocating dead zones and even alter the food web on which the bay’s fish and crabs depend, scientists say. Drawing on remote sensing by satellites, researchers at U-Md.’s Center for Environmental Science found that water temperatures have risen since the 1980s across more than 92 percent of the Chesapeake and its river tributaries. The study appeared in the October issue of the journal Remote Sensing of Environment. The overall increase averaged nearly 1.2 degrees per decade, according to Andrew J. Elmore, co-author of the study and a geologist at the center’s Appalachian laboratory in Frostburg, Md. But Baltimore and some other parts of the bay showed up in the sensing data as “hot spots,” with warmer water than that in surrounding areas. Elmore and his co-author, Haiyong Ding, a visiting scholar from China, say the heat anomalies appear to be linked to spreading urbanization and to warm-water discharges from power plants. “In the case of power generation, we’re deliberately increasing the temperature of water,” Elmore said. “With urbanization, it’s not intentional, but it’s an effect.” As more buildings and pavement cover the landscape, he said, they increase the amount of rainfall running into nearby streams, warming it as it flows across sun-baked surfaces. The warming trend seen in the satellite data echoes findings of earlier studies. Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey reported last year, for instance, that most of the streams feeding into the bay are warming, with an overall average temperature increase of 2.5 degrees since 1960. But Elmore said this is the most comprehensive and current picture of changes in water temperature in the Chesapeake. “It’s not a new finding that the bay is warming,” said Donald F. Boesch, president of the university’s environmental science center. “But [this] brings it up to date.” By using wide-ranging satellites instead of a series of temperature gauges in the water, Boesch said, “you can even see the bay warming from space.” When comparing these findings with those of earlier studies, Elmore said, the satellite data indicate that the bay’s warming has accelerated in the past few decades. That has implications for the bay’s water quality as well as for the plants and creatures that can live in it, Elmore and other U-Md. scientists say. “Many of the changes we see in the bay are tied in with these changes in temperature,” Elmore said. “What are we restoring the bay to?” Maryland and other states in the bay watershed are under a federal “pollution diet” to reduce the algae-feeding nutrients from farms and urban areas that cause an oxygen-starved dead zone to form every year. Rising water temperatures could make it harder to shrink that dead zone or keep it from coming back, suggested Lora Harris, an ecologist with U-Md.’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons. Warmer water tends to hold less dissolved oxygen, she noted, and it can aggravate the layering, or “stratification,” of the bay’s waters, which makes it easier for dead zones to form. Warming waters also could alter the types of algae and microscopic animals populating the bay, Harris said. That might mean less to eat for fish and crabs. “Menhaden — they love a juicy diatom,” she said. “Small cyanobacteria, not so much.” “Eelgrass and soft clams are going to have an increasingly difficult time as the bay warms,’’ Boesch added. Climate-warmed water wasn’t factored into pollution-reduction goals set five years ago by the Environmental Protection Agency for shrinking the bay’s dead zone. But federal regulators are now using it in their reassessment of how much more needs to be done over the next decade, said Zoe Johnson, a climate change coordinator in the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program office. The bay states and the federal government also agreed last year to adjust strategies for restoring and maintaining the bay’s plants and creatures to account for effects of climate change, such as warming temperatures, shifts in precipitation and rising sea level. “There can be winners and losers,” Johnson said. Although declines in eelgrass could rob juvenile fish and crabs of places to hide from predators, other species — such as southern flounder and red and black drum — may find a warmer bay more hospitable. But it’s difficult to do more precise handicapping, she stressed, because average water temperatures aren’t as influential on the fortunes of plants and animals as are the extreme hot or cold temperatures they can endure. Boesch said warming is happening gradually enough now that it’s unlikely to seriously undercut efforts to clean up nutrient and sediment pollution in the bay. The states are now committed to doing enough by 2025 to shrink the dead zone, based on current computer models. But Boesch said that if climate change isn’t slowed, it could make it hard to maintain water quality over the longer term. “It isn’t hopeless,” said Harris, the U-Md. ecologist. She contended that the most useful aspect of the new study is the focus it has put on land-based sources of warmer water, reinforcing the need to reduce sun-heated storm-water runoff and discharges from power plants. “Now we have a much clearer picture of what’s happening where,” Harris said. “That does give us the ability to think about how to optimize investments in restoration.” ** — Baltimore Sun  **

Maritime job opportunities in the federal government

This weekend, I will be in Baltimore for the Star-Spangled Sailabration. Its the national launch of the Bicentennial of the War of 1812 and the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Running until Tuesday, the Star-Spangled Sailabration is one of the signature events of the three-year commemoration, called Star-Spangled 200. This week’s event will feature more than 40 tall ships and naval war ships, concerts and the Star-Spangled Air Show featuring the U.S. Navy Blue Angels. If you are a person interested in our country’s history and naval and maritime operations, this will be a little slice of heaven. The celebration has me thinking about the federal government’s maritime involvement. And I’m thinking beyond the great works of the U.S. Navy (Navy.mil) and U.S. Coast Guard (USCG.mil). Let’s take a look at some others: Maritime Administration: An agency under the Department of Transportation, it focuses on waterborne transportation. It works in many areas — from shipbuilding to port operations to national security and the environment. The agency maintains a fleet of cargo ships in reserve to provide surge sea lift during war and national emergencies, and it is responsible for disposing of ships in that fleet, as well as other obsolete noncombatant government ships. It also provides support for educating future mariners, and programs to educate young people about the maritime industry’s importance. Learn more here: www.marad.dot.gov. Then there is the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. The government-run school trains those who will serve as shipboard officers and as leaders in the maritime transportation field. You can learn more here: www.usmma.edu. On the regulatory and compliance side, there’s the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC). It regulates the U.S. international ocean transportation system. The agency ensures competitive and efficient ocean transportation services for the shipping public and protects the public from financial harm, and it contributes to the integrity and security of the U.S. supply chain and transportation. You can find out more about the FMC here: www.fmc.gov. NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides weather forecasts, conducts climate monitoring, manages fisheries and does oversight of coastal restoration projects. More info is here: www.noaa.gov. On the Homeland Security side beyond the Coast Guard, you have Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Air and Marine. It states on its Web site that the “Office of Air and Marine is the world’s largest aviation and maritime law enforcement organization with more than 1,200 Federal Agents, operating from 80 air and marine locations, with more than 260 aircraft of 26 different types, and 297 marine vessels.” More info is available at: www.cbp.gov I could go on and on. Many agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Naval Research, National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey, all operate vessels. If you are interested in working in the maritime field, the federal government is full of opportunity. First, stop by Sailabration, enjoy the festivities, learn some history and pat a sailor on the back.

In Florida, a water-pollution warning that glows at night

COCOA, Fla. — Karen McLaughlin normally carries a flashlight for her nighttime kayak trips along Florida’s Banana River to spot any alligators resting on the banks. But these days, it’s the river itself that glows in the dark. “It’s beautiful!” McLaughlin, an eco-tour guide, said as her boat’s wake set off an eerie light show on a moonless October night. Each dip of her paddle stirred up bioluminescent plankton that have invaded this eastern Florida waterway in record numbers since late summer. Like millions of tiny fireflies, they lit a jumping fish in a geyser of emerald light. A manatee out for the evening glowed like an alien spaceship as it passed underneath. It was striking, but also strange: In a region where explosive “blooms” of toxic or nuisance algae have battered fisheries and killed dolphins and sea turtles in recent years, the glowing microorganisms represent another mysterious shift in an ecosystem that scientists say is out of kilter. In the same week that some Florida researchers monitored the bioluminescent algae on Florida’s East Coast, others were keeping watch on remnants of a massive “red tide” in the Gulf of Mexico, a swath of toxic algae that at one point stretched 100 miles. From Southern California’s beaches to the Chesapeake Bay, waterways across the United States are seeing increasing numbers of algae blooms, with impacts including tainted drinking water and poisoned shellfish beds. Some are linked to higher levels of nitrogen pollution from livestock waste and fertilizers from suburban lawns and farms. Others are mostly natural events that are occurring in new places as oceans and inland lakes grow warmer. But in Florida, where three-quarters of the state’s 20 million residents live in coastal counties, a sudden change in the water is more than a colorful curiosity. Algae blooms, with their potential for damaging local economies, are the subject of particularly intense research here, as scientists and environmental officials seek to pinpoint their cause while improving early detection systems that can predict when and where they will occur. While recent discoveries have helped unravel some of the mysteries behind the appearance of algae blooms, they also underscore for local officials and business owners the extreme difficulty of resolving a problem that stems from decades of overdevelopment and lax controls. In Florida, officials are debating solutions including improved wastewater treatment and vacuuming up several feet of organic sludge that lies at the bottom of some coastal waterways. “People like to point fingers, but all of us are to blame,” said Clark Giangarra, a former Long Island clammer who has operated charter boats for eco-tourists and fishermen for 30 years along Florida’s central Atlantic Coast. “These organisms have existed here forever, but the system goes crazy when you dump in too many nutrients.” The sheer scale of some of the recent outbreaks strains comprehension. The enormous red tide that developed off the state’s Gulf Coast is one of the largest ever measured: about 6,000 square miles, or slightly larger than Connecticut. Red tides, caused by a species of toxic plankton, are not directly triggered by nutrients from the land, but some scientists believe that red-tide episodes are occurring earlier in the season and lasting longer because of climatic changes that heat up the oceans. Florida scientists activated sensors and dispatched new underwater robots called “gliders” to explore this year’s red tide and beam signals to monitoring stations on land. The new equipment allowed health officials to “see” the algae bloom as it starts to form, days or weeks before the appearance of telltale swaths of red water on the surface, said Quay Dortch, who heads a program for algae-bloom research at the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We have reached the point where we can see it coming,” Dortch said. While massive in size, this year’s red tide has mostly remained offshore, with only occasional patches washing up along Gulf of Mexico beaches where they can kill fish, poison oyster beds and cause respiratory problems for mammals, including dolphins and people. By contrast, on Florida’s central Atlantic Coast, algae invasions have tended to be smaller in scale but more disruptive to wildlife and local economies. The Indian River Lagoon, a 150-mile long estuary that runs from Cape Canaveral to just north of Palm Beach and is regarded as one of the country’s most diverse and productive waterways, is recovering from a disastrous “brown tide” algae bloom in 2011. Then, the waterway — which includes numerous smaller tributaries such as the Banana River — became choked with mats of algae so dense that it blocked the sun’s rays from reaching the sea bottom, wiping out sea grasses that serve as a critical food source and nursery for many of the region’s marine species. Manatees, the gentle sea mammals beloved by Floridians, died by the scores from disease and the toxic effects of seaweed and other plants that became the manatees’ alternative diet. The reasons for the destructive outbreak are in dispute, but new research shows that years of seemingly subtle changes — from upticks in water temperature and salinity to a gradual buildup of nutrient-dense sludge on the sea floor — helped set the stage for the drastic changes seen in more recent years. Today, a single event, such as a hurricane or a sudden temperature change, can trigger a “trophic cascade” in which harmful species can come out on top, said Brian Lapointe, an expert on algae blooms and a professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. “When you disrupt the ecosystem with nutrients, it creates a bottom-up effect that goes right up the food chain,” Lapointe said. The pollutants that cause algae blooms are primarily nitrogen and phosphorus that seep into the water from countless subdivisions, livestock operations and fertilized fields that line the waterways and tributaries farther upstream. It’s the same problem that regional governments have grappled with for years in the Chesapeake Bay, where excess nutrient pollution creates annual “dead zones,” a closely related phenomenon that occurs when decaying algae suck the oxygen from the water. Fish and other aquatic animals that can’t escape from a dead zone die of suffocation. As in Florida, the problem for the bay is that the farms and cities in the watershed keep growing, replacing forests, wetlands and meadows that once served as a filtering buffer for polluted rainwater runoff, conversation groups say. “Without this natural filtering system, when it rains, the water washes pollution into our local creeks, creating a toxic stew,” said Hedrick Belin, president of the Potomac River Conservancy, a nonprofit group devoted to the river’s protection. And the Chesapeake Bay region is hardly alone. Last year, harmful algal blooms were reported in 21 states, up from 20 states the previous year, according to a report by the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center, an environmental nonprofit group, and Resource Media, a nonprofit public relations organization. New York reported 50 cases of toxic algae outbreaks, followed by Kansas with 18 and Washington with 12. An August algal bloom in Lake Erie brought Toledo to its knees, forcing residents to turn off their taps for three days after health officials declared city water to be unsafe to drink. The reason for the bloom was a familiar story: Sewer overflows, farm fertilizers and a cocktail of nutrients from livestock manure created the perfect conditions for algae to bloom in great mats of green slime. New science is making it easier to pinpoint precise sources of pollution for specific events. In Florida, a chemical analysis by Lapointe’s laboratory showed that much nitrogen is seeping into the water from tens of thousands of leaking septic tanks, the go-to choice for home builders in a region that lacks sufficient municipal wastewater treatment. For years, developers have opposed new water-treatment plants so they could build houses cheaply and quickly to satisfy the state’s ever-growing demand, Lapointe said. “Septic tanks have been the magic carpet for the developers in getting communities built quickly,” Lapointe said. “But now it has caught up with us.” The impact of excessive nutrients can differ from one year to the next. The “brown tide” of 2011 did not return this year, but scientists continue to see dramatic shifts in plankton populations, including this year’s explosive growth of bioluminescent plankton in the lagoon’s upper reaches near Cape Canaveral. The tiny creatures that cause the water to light up are hardly new to the region, and while some emit a mild toxin, they are generally regarded as harmless. Yet, this year’s bloom was unprecedented in the memories of local scientists and outdoorsmen, said Lapointe, who added that toxins from huge numbers of plankton are starting to concentrate in some fish species. Though striking to look at, the colorful plankton are a symbol of changes with “ramifications up and down the food chain,” he said. “When you disturb the system with nutrients, you get can get shifts in the frequency and extent of these microbial populations,” he said, “and that can lead to serious negative effects, both for ecosystems and for human health.” **** ** joby.warrick@washpost.com  ** **** ** darryl.fears@washpost.com  **

Pot is increasingly legal. Employers need to stop screening for it.

Legal barriers to marijuana are falling all over the United States. Pot, tried by nearly half of all Americans at some point in their lives, is already legal in some form in 23 states, and four states allow recreational use. Last Friday, two House bills were filed that could end the federal prohibition of marijuana, including one which would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act’s schedules and regulate it similarly to alcohol. And as of the early minutes of this morning, pot is legal in the District of Columbia.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now there’s one thing that needs to disappear along with the prohibition of marijuana: employee drug testing. Privacy arguments aside—should employers really be in the business of demanding body fluids from their workers?—this testing is expensive and does not effectively screen for good employees. In fact, it probably doesn’t effectively screen for drug users. Yet companies continue to drug test potential employees, even in states where medical marijuana is legal. Even back in 1999, when pot legalization was nothing more than a pipe dream, an ACLU study concluded that drug tests were overly expensive and a poor indicator of workplace performance because they don’t test for impairments. Drug tests search for drug metabolites, which are by-products excreted from the body after a drug has been ingested. This means tests might catch a person who used an illicit substance in the recent past but probably not a person who is under the influence during the taking of the test; it takes a few hours for drug metabolites to appear in urine. Tests are arguably more likely to catch occasional users than drug abusers. As the ACLU concluded, “If drug-related impairment on the job is an employer’s primary concern, drug testing is both an over-inclusive and an under-inclusive strategy.” The study also said that the most common “illicit drug users” were occasional marijuana users.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And most illegal drugs are less impairing than alcohol, which is not tested for by employers, as the National Academy of Science has noted. If anything, the Academy concluded from lab studies, moderate doses of stimulants and cocaine had “slight performance-enhancing effects.” The use of certain drugs may not even have a correlation with poor work performance. Companies with drug testing actually have lower productivity over ones that don’t, according to one study.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Even if an employer wanted to keep drug testing employees for substances other than marijuana, they are unlikely to catch them. Pot stays in the body the longest of any classified drug and can show up in urine tests weeks or months after its used. Cocaine can pass through the system in as little as one to three days, and meth can leave the body in one to five days, though this varies slightly depending on age and usage. If a worker binged on cocaine or meth and took a drug test a few days later, he or she might pass more easily than somebody who smoked a joint a few weeks ago. Medical marijuana use among workers further illustrates how futile drug testing can be. People who are prescribed marijuana for a disability or injury can still be fired or denied employment if they test positive for THC, even in states where medical marijuana is legal. This often is the case with national companies who apply the same regulations in all the states in which they operate. In 2010, Dish Network fired customer service representative Brandon Coats after he tested positive for THC. Coats is a quadriplegic living in Colorado who is prescribed medical marijuana. Dish Network’s “zero-tolerance” drug policy doesn’t recognize medical marijuana, even though Colorado’s constitution has allowed the use of cannabis with written medical consent since 2000. (Interestingly, some companies that ban pot will allow medically prescribed Oxycontin, at one point the poster child for prescription pill abuse in the United States.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Screening for pot was never good policy for employers. Continuing to do so as medical marijuana became legal made even less sense. Now that recreational use becomes more acceptable under the law, it’s downright illogical.

Navy reassigns commander of squadron whose sailors were detained by Iran

Navy leaders have reassigned the commander of the squadron whose sailors were detained earlier this year by Iran in what was an embarrassing episode for the Obama administration, the Navy said on Friday.  “Rasch was relieved due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command. He has been temporarily reassigned to CRG-1,” the statement said. The decision, which amounts to firing the officer from his command position, is the first disciplinary move to be made public after the incident, in which two riverine command boats were surrounded off Iran’s Farsi Island by Revolutionary Guard personnel on Jan. 12. Riverine command boats are used to transit rivers or shallow waters.   After the incident, the Navy’s 5th Fleet, which oversees naval operations in the Middle East, began an investigation of what took place; that probe has not yet been finalized. The statement released on Friday said that the CRG-1 commander made his decision after reviewing preliminary findings from that investigation. Additional personnel could be disciplined when the probe is completed.

Your stoner friend really is a lot more relaxed than you, scientists confirm

But that particular study simply measured the effects of a single dose of THC — what about the effects of repeated heavy cannabis use?  Half of each group, users and nonusers, was subject to a particularly anxiety-inducing laboratory test commonly used to measure stress responses: They had to dunk their hands in a container of cold water for anywhere from 45 to 90 seconds, and then count backward from 2,043 by 17, getting reprimanded by lab workers whenever they got a number wrong. As if that weren't bad enough, they were also shown a live video feed of their faces as they attempted to count. The other half of each group was subject to a non-stressful “control” scenario: Dip a hand in warm water, count from 1 to 25, no reprimands, no video.   The heavy users, in other words, reacted to a stressful situation with equanimity and chill even though they weren't stoned at the time of the test. There's an outside chance that some of this effect could be due to self-selection: Perhaps naturally relaxed people are more inclined to become frequent cannabis users? But the effects were observed in a controlled laboratory experiment, making the causal link much stronger than it would have been if the researchers had just relied on, say, preexisting survey data.

The right way to respond to Sandy

Eugene Robinson is right [“Keeping the next storm at bay,” op-ed, Nov. 6]. As a country, we must act swiftly to reevaluate our nation’s system of storm and flood protection and to strategically invest significant federal resources in infrastructure before the next Hurricane Sandy. But building big isn’t the only answer. We cannot simply build seawalls and tidal gates or armor our shorelines as a way out of the impacts from future storms. As Sandy and other recent superstorms have made clear, the forces of nature are too powerful. As we move past short-term response operations, long-term recovery and related rebuilding plans must harness the capacity of our natural environment to lessen the impacts of storms. In light of the highly urbanized shoreline along much of the East Coast, we have a responsibility to ensure that all long-term recovery and related infrastructure improvements include restoring coastal wetlands and living resources such as oyster reefs and salt marshes that knock down storm waves and reduce devastating storm surges before they reach the people and property along the shore. Federal investments that incorporate these types of projects are the only way we will see safe, resilient coastal communities in the decades to come. ****Jeff Benoit** , Arlington** The writer is president and chief executive of Restore America’s Estuaries.

Report: Studies reveal drug-resistant super bacteria in Rio Olympics water venues

The long list of water-borne bacteria issues that have plagued the 2016 Summer Olympics from the moment Rio pledged to clean its waterways in 2009 may be growing with the addition of super bacteria.  The first study, reviewed by members of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Diego, revealed microbes at five of Rio’s beaches — Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Botafogo and Flamengo. Ninety percent of the samples taken at Flamengo, the location of Olympic sailing events, contained the super bacteria. The Copacabana samples revealed the microbes to be present in 10 percent of samples. In addition to being the location of open-water and triathlon events, the venues are also a spot for locals and tourists to visit. The second study was conducted by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation lab and will be published in the July edition of the American Society for Microbiology. This study uncovered the super bacteria genes in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, the location of rowing and canoe Olympic events. Exposure to the super bacteria can result in urinary, gastrointestinal, pulmonary and bloodstream infections and meningitis; according to Reuters, the CDC says the studies revealed fatal results in half of those infected. A February report by “Outside the Lines” revealed the goal set by Rio after being awarded the Olympics in 2009 — to clean 80 percent of the sewage plaguing local waterways — would not be met.

Federal drug testing rules race to catch up to illegal prescription drugs

The federal drug-testing program had its beginnings one cloudy January afternoon when two men shared a joint. At the time, they were operating three 130-ton locomotives. A few minutes later, after blowing through a railroad signal light just north of Baltimore, they collided with an Amtrak train packed with passengers, many of them college students heading back to school after their winter break. Three Amtrak passenger cars were destroyed, 16 people died and 174 were injured. When the drug tests proved positive, federal officials started a program to regularly test railroad workers. Less than four years later, in 1991, Congress decreed that in addition to railroad crews, airline workers who flew, people with commercial driver’s licenses, transit employees and the U.S. Coast Guard also should be tested for five critical drugs. Twenty-five years later, the test remains the same, but illegal drug use has changed significantly. The 21st century has become the era of addiction to prescription painkillers — drugs with familiar brand names such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, Fentanyl and Valium. The federal program doesn’t test for any of them, or for any of the other popular synthetic opioids. This is not a case, however, of federal officials missing the boat in updating their drug testing. Instead, it is a case study in the long and tedious process required to change a federal rule. At the turn of the century, deaths from illegal use of prescription drugs mirrored the number from cocaine, about 4,000. By 2013 they had nearly quadrupled, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was calling the abuse of prescription drugs an epidemic. “From 2013 to 2014, the largest increase in the rate of drug overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids,” the CDC said in a report. A record 28,647 people died from heroin and prescription opioid use in 2014. “It was really around 2008, 2009 when we started to see a problem,” said Ron Flegel, who heads the Division of Workplace Testing at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). If all goes according to schedule, the rule to allow testing of transportation workers for illegal prescription drugs will emerge in 2017. Changing rules, or creating new rules, in the federal government is a bit like herding cats and generates mountains of paperwork. The rule change being shepherded by SAMHSA will have gone through 14 steps, multiple agency reviews and a period for public comment before taking effect. Five years of work has been devoted to making two basic changes: One would allow testing for illegal prescription drugs, and the other would allow test labs to use saliva, in addition to urine, for testing. Federal lore abounds with examples of the ponderous and protracted rule-making process. A classic illustration is the rule to install back-up cameras in cars. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed a law that specified that the cameras be installed in new cars by 2011. But first, it fell to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to draft a formal rule to enforce the law. NHTSA proposed a rule to phase in camera use in 2012, with the goal that all new cars would have them by 2014. The proposal was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which recommended that NHTSA consider cheaper alternatives. After bouncing around among federal agencies and the OMB, the rule was finalized in 2014, the same year that a NHTSA study said an average of 232 people a year, including 95 children, were killed in back-overs that the cameras might have prevented. By next year, six years after Bush signed the law, 40 percent of new cars will be required to have back-up cameras. All new cars must have them by 2018, seven years later than Congress had intended. NHTSA found an artful way around the rule-making process when it came to driverless cars. Aware that the speed at which the technology was being developed probably would render any rule outdated by the time it was finalized, NHTSA plans to announce “guidance” for automakers and state officials. It won’t be enforceable, but neither did it take so long to reach fruition, and it will allow the agency flexibility in dealing with emerging technology. There was no workaround for SAMHSA when the need arose to test for illegal prescription drugs. “You have to make it scientifically supportable and forensically sound,” Flegel said. “It is a lengthy process, but a very necessary process to go through because you’re proposing a rule.” Since 1991, transportation workers have been tested for marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, natural opiates and PCP. Although awareness of the prescription-drug problem began a few years earlier, changing the official rule to allow testing for it began in 2012, when the SAMHSA administrator received a recommendation from her Drug Testing Advisory Board. As Flegel recounts the timeline, the recommendation was passed on to the secretary for Health and Human Services, and the Behavioral Health Coordinating Committee for a two-month review. The surgeon general also was asked to have a look. Then a proposed rule was drawn up by the Division of Workplace Programs and sent to the SAMHSA administrator for review. “That was about a year later, in 2013,” Flegel said. After incorporating revisions received so far, the proposal was sent to the OMB, which looked it over and then distributed it to federal agencies to gather their comments. “There’s multiple agencies that have rule-making that look at it specifically,” Flegel said. Based on agency comments, SAMHSA revised the proposed rule once more. “Then that process starts over,” Flegel said. “It goes back to HHS, back to OMB and, once approved by OMB, goes out for public comment.” The window for public comment is open for three months. “We pull those comments from the public and then revise the proposed mandatory guidelines accordingly,” Flegel said. Right now, those revisions are under another round of reviews. “We are now still in the process where it has been revised, it has gone through an HHS clearance and it has now been logged in so the public can see the website,” Flegel said. “The next steps to the process would be, once approved by OMB, it will go out as a federal register notice, and that federal register notice will be the final guidelines and it will have an implementation date.” Asked when he expects the testing to begin, Flegel said, “I can’t really give an estimated date. But what we had sort of looked at was try to implement around the first of the year, so we can assume it will be 2017.” What those tests may reveal was foreshadowed by post-accident testing of railroad workers this year. After a crash, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) conducts more exhaustive testing than for just the five drugs covered by the 1991 rule. “We know that the country is struggling with an opioid epidemic — and there is no reason why our industry would be immune from an epidemic affecting the entire country,” FRA Administrator Sarah E. Feinberg said last week in remarks to the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee. In at least one of six post-accident tests that were positive for drug use, the worker was on OxyContin, internal federal records indicate. After the fatal 1987 collision between the Conrail locomotives and the Amtrak train, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that a shared marijuana joint was the “probable cause.” The Conrail brakeman, Butch Cromwell, agreed to testify against the engineer, Ricky Lynn Gates, in return for immunity from prosecution. Gates was charged with manslaughter by locomotive and served four years in prison.

In U.S. drinking water, many chemicals are regulated — but many aren’t

PITTSBORO, N.C. — For all the pathogens and chemicals monitored by the federal government to protect drinking water, a far broader universe of “emerging contaminants” is going unregulated. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps tabs on scores of substances that have surfaced in water systems around the country, with the aim of restricting those that endanger public health. But partly because the rules that the agency must follow are complicated and contentious, officials have failed to successfully regulate any new contaminant in two decades. Only once since the 1990s has the EPA come close to imposing a new standard — for perchlorate, a chemical found in explosives, road flares, rocket fuel and, it turns out, the drinking water of over 16 million people. The years of inaction, critics say, have left many Americans at potential risk from substances that few even realize might be in their water in the first place. “We live in a country where we’ve made a fundamental decision that chemicals are safe unless they’re proven to be bad,” said Jeffrey Griffiths, a public health professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who studies waterborne diseases. “We have this system which is biased toward the presumption of innocence.” Here in North Carolina, one of the contaminants on the government’s watch list has been found in rivers and streams on which more than a million people depend. Since 2013, Detlef Knappe and a team of researchers at N.C. State University have logged hundreds of miles as they gather samples along the Cape Fear River basin. From Greensboro in the heart of the state to the coastal city of Wilmington, they have identified troubling levels of 1,4-dioxane, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing that can be found in paint strippers, varnishes, detergents, shampoos and cosmetics. The EPA has deemed it a “likely human carcinogen,” although limited data exist on the cancer risks it poses for people. “1,4-dioxane really has no business being in the water,” said Knappe, an environmental engineering professor who has worked with state regulators and the National Science Foundation to dig deeper into the issue. “This has probably been going on for decades, but no one has really looked at it. . . We only find what we look for.” The EPA keeps a list of about 100 unregulated contaminants that have made their way into water supplies from industrial sites and other sources. Every five years, the agency updates a shorter lineup of chemicals that it thinks should be tracked and studied and requires utilities to do testing. The current inventory includes two viruses and 28 chemicals, including 1,4-dioxane. The goal is to eventually regulate those that pose the greatest risk to public health. But critics say that regulators should be moving far more assertively, even as scientists continue researching the short- and long-term health impacts. They blame both the system set up by Congress as well as the agency’s glacial pace. “For an agency to be unable to adopt a single new standard in 20 years is inexcusable,” said Erik Olson, health and environment program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s a combination of a bad law and very bad implementation.” In the wake of the lead crisis in Flint, Mich., and other problems in communities elsewhere, many people are increasingly wary of what flows from the faucets of their homes and schools — and whether the federal government is doing enough to safeguard drinking water. In April, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that more than 60 percent of Americans rate the government’s efforts as just fair or poor. In 1974, the newly enacted Safe Drinking Water Act gave the EPA broad authority to monitor and regulate the nation’s public drinking-water supplies. The agency adopted existing standards covering nearly two dozen microbial and inorganic chemical contaminants. When regulators took too long to expand that number, Congress made clear in 1986 that it wanted faster action. A bipartisan majority passed additional legislation requiring the agency to establish drinking-water limits for scores of contaminants — including bacteria such as legionella and chemical compounds including acrylamide and xylene. Lawmakers also directed the agency to set up a system for monitoring still-unregulated contaminants. The result over the next decade was health-based thresholds for more than 85 substances, including a range of disinfection byproducts and chemicals known to increase the risks of kidney damage, high blood pressure and cancer, among other conditions. Those efforts prompted complaints from some local water officials about the increased costs and time needed to comply with the wave of new regulations. Utilities faced testing and treatment requirements for a growing list of contaminants — some that appeared only in certain parts of the country and some that scientists were still studying to determine their public health implications. In 1996, Congress intervened again. This time, lawmakers directed the EPA to do detailed cost-benefit analyses on additional contaminants that it sought to restrict. The agency also had to ensure that sufficient science existed to establish the public health risks of a particular substance before attempting to regulate it. “It created this Herculean set of tasks that EPA had to go through before they could adopt any new standards,” Olson said. In the 20 years since, the EPA has come close to successfully regulating only one new chemical contaminant in drinking water. In 2011, reversing a Bush administration decision, the agency announced its intention to set a federal standard for perchlorate. Exposure to the chemicalcan disrupt thyroid function in humans. Yet the agency still has not put any limits in place. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently sued, saying the EPA’s inaction could be exposing children and pregnant women to harm. Joel Beauvais, who leads the EPA’s Office of Water, acknowledged that the agency’s pace in regulating new chemicals had slowed, in part because of the system mandated by Congress. “It’s a rather intensive process to get one of these drinking-water regulations across the finish line,” he said. The law demands that the agency move deliberately — and there are reasons for that, he said. A substance may occur in only a very small number of drinking-water systems, for instance, or it may not have been detected at levels of concern. Before the EPA imposes new burdens on thousands of water systems, it must prove that there is a meaningful opportunity to improve public health. “These are very consequential regulations,” he said. “They are consequential from a health perspective. They are consequential from an economic perspective.” Beauvais noted that the EPA has updated standards for certain contaminants as well as revised other rules, such as those for treating wastewater, in ways that help contain the number of contaminants in drinking water. Officials also have said that they are exploring new approaches and could begin regulating entire groups of substances rather than targeting one at a time. The agency has issued numerous health advisories — most recently for perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a potentially toxic compound that has turned up in many water systems — that can prompt state and local officials to take action or at least notify residents about contaminants. Ultimately, though, the advisories are unenforceable. The American Water Works Association says the EPA should winnow its list to focus on a handful of chemicals that pose the biggest public health concerns. “In a resource-constrained world, it’s hard to make progress spreading your resources broadly,” said Steve Via, the association’s director of federal relations. “The way the current process is running, with large numbers of contaminants on the list, you don’t get enough focus to achieve progress. When you don’t achieve progress, folks ask if the process is working.” Congress on Tuesday passed a sweeping revision of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, which covers thousands of chemicals in products as diverse as sippy cups, paint thinners and permanent-press clothing. The overhaul will give the EPA the power to require health and safety data for untested chemicals and to prevent substances from reaching the market — and, ultimately, drinking-water sources — if they have not been determined to be safe. Implementation will take years, however. “Prevention is an incredibly important issue for the country over time,” Beauvais said. “If we regulate more on the front end, we’re less likely to have contamination from chemicals with adverse health effects on the back end.” In North Carolina, environmental officials published a report earlier this year detailing a year’s worth of sampling for 1,4-dioxane within the Cape Fear River basin. It highlighted “hot spots” for the contaminant located immediately downstream of wastewater facilities, suggesting that manufacturers or other industrial operators were sending it into municipal sewers. Current water treatments do not effectively remove the chemical. “People are understandably concerned,” said Steve Drew, Greensboro’s director of water resources. “[But] in the absence of enforceable limits, what is a water system to do?” His department and other downstream communities responded by launching a sort of detective operation. They tested hundreds of miles of sewer lines and met with business owners to track down the possible sources of 1,4-dioxane. “We got it down to about a half-dozen or so businesses — a couple that had very high levels of 1,4-dioxane discharged into our system,” Drew said. “These companies are not even thinking about it because they aren’t regulated on it.” He said the companies have been “very diligent” in trying to alter supply chains and remove the chemical voluntarily from their manufacturing processes. There are early signs that those efforts are slowly beginning to lower 1,4-dioxane levels in the river basin. But if companies balk, Drew has no way to force them to cooperate. “Right now,” he said, “it’s completely dependent on good relationships, and ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ ”

Seahawks, Dolphins fallout: Seattle players face suspensions, report says

Seattle Seahawks starting cornerbacks, Richard Sherman and Brandon Browner, are facing four-game suspensions for violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing drug policy, reportedly stemming from their use of Adderall. The Seahawks, in a statement issued Sunday night, said they “are aware of” the report, which came from ESPN’s Adam Schefter. Sherman denied using Adderall, usually prescribed for attention deficit disorder, after the Seahawks’ loss to the Miami Dolphins. The NFL allows players to take some banned substances, like Adderall, if they are prescribed by a doctor and approved in advance by the league. Adderall is a combination of dextroamphetamine and amphetamine. “Something I have never done,” Sherman said in a text message to the NFL.com’s Steve Wyche. He said he has not “taken anything” that would warrant a suspension and tweeted:  If suspended, Sherman and Browner, considered to be among the top cornerback combos in the league, could play until their appeal, which would be expedited, has been heard. Their absence, though, could affect the NFC wild-card race, with the 6-5 Seahawks playing the Bears on Sunday in Chicago. They would be replaced by Marcus Trufant and Walter Thurmond. There have been a number of suspensions for unapproved Adderall use this season. Why would a player use Adderall without getting a prescription and league approval ahead of time? Perhaps for a big boost as a long season enters its stretch and a playoff berth is on the line. It has an effect “like a hundred cups of coffee,” an unnamed player told CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman in October. Players told Freeman that they usually take it with diet soda or coffee, which heightens their ability to concentrate for 10-to-15 hours. Adderall has been on the league’s performance-enhancing drug list since 2006. Follow @CindyBoren on Twitter and on Facebook.

There are a lot of gross microbes on a dollar bill

We live in a dirty world. Wherever we go, we are among microbes. Bacteria, fungi and viruses live on our phones, bus seats, door handles and park benches. We pass these tiny organisms to each other when we share a handshake or a seat on the plane. Now, researchers are finding we also share our microbes through our money. From tip jars to vending machines, each dollar, passed person to person, samples a bit of the environment it comes from and passes those bits to the next person, the next place it goes. The list of things found on our dollars includes DNA from our pets, traces of drugs, and bacteria and viruses that cause disease. The findings demonstrate how money can silently record human activities, leaving behind what are called “molecular echoes.” In April, a study identified more than 100 different strains of bacteria on dollar bills circulating in New York City. Some of the most common bugs on our bills included _Propionibacterium acnes_ , a bacterium known to cause acne, and _Streptococcus oralis_ , a common bacterium found in our mouths. The research team, led by biologist Jane Carlton at New York University, also discovered traces of DNA from domestic animals and from specific bacteria that are associated only with certain foods. A similar study recovered traces of DNA on the keypads of automated teller machines, or ATMs, reflecting the foods people ate in different neighborhoods. People in central Harlem ate more domestic chicken than those in Flushing and Chinatown, who ate more species of bony fish and mollusks. The foods people ate transferred from fingers to touch screens, where scientists could recover a bit of their most recent meals. We don’t leave only food behind. Traces of cocaine can be found on almost 80 percent of dollar bills. Other drugs, including morphine, heroin, methamphetamine and amphetamine, can also be found on bills, though less commonly than cocaine. Identifying foods that people eat or the drugs people use based on interactions with money might not seem all that useful, but scientists are also using such data to understand patterns of disease. Most of the microbes the researchers in New York identified do not cause disease. But other studies have suggested that disease-causing strains of bacteria or virus could be passed along with our currency. Bacteria that cause food-borne illness — including salmonella and a pathogenic strain of _E. coli_ — have been shown to survive on pennies, nickels and dimes, and can hide out on ATMs. Other bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant _Staphylococcus aureus,_ which causes skin infections, are found on bank notes in the United States and Canada, but the extent to which they could spread infections is unknown. Try as we may to avoid exposure to germs, they travel with us and on us. Even if disease-causing microbes can survive in places such as ATMs, the good news is that most exposures don’t make us sick. Disease transmission linked to money is rare, and no major disease outbreaks have started from our ATMs. Although it doesn’t seem common for diseases to transmit through money, there are ways we could make our money cleaner. Researchers are working on ways to clean money between transactions. Putting older bills through a machine that exposes them to carbon dioxide at a specific temperature and pressure can strip dollar bills of oils and dirt left behind by human fingers, while the heat kills microbes that would otherwise linger. U.S. money is still made from a blend of cotton and linen, which has been shown to have higher bacterial growth than plastic polymers. Several countries are transitioning from money made of natural fibers to plastic, which may be less friendly to bacteria. Canada has had plastic money since 2013, and Britain transitioned to a plastic-based bank note last year. Even if our money is not directly responsible for spreading disease, we can still use the dollar’s travel history to track how we spread disease in other ways. WheresGeorge.com, a website created in 1998, lets users track dollar bills by recording their serial numbers. In the almost 20 years since the site’s creation, WheresGeorge has tracked the geographic locations of bills totaling more than a billion dollars. Now, physicists at the Max Planck Institute and University of California at Santa Barbara are using data from WheresGeorge to track epidemics. Information on human movement and contact rates from WheresGeorge was even used to predict the spread of the 2009 swine flu. Although we don’t know the extent to which money allows diseases to spread, Mom’s advice is probably best when handling cash: Wash your hands, and don’t stick it in your mouth. Ohm is a graduate student in biology at Pennsylvania State University. Andrew Read, Evan Pugh University Professor of Biology and Entomology at Pennsylvania State University, contributed to this article, which was originally published on theconversation.com.

Why did Scott Pruitt refuse to ban a chemical that the EPA itself said is dangerous?

On March 29, Scott Pruitt, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denied a  petition asking for a ban on the use of an insecticide called Chlorpyrifos. The petitioners, Pesticide Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council, cited studies show that Chlorpyrifos can have serious health consequences, such as damaging the nervous system of infants and children. Understanding why the EPA denied  this petition means focusing on two related factors: the relative powerlessness of the communities affected by Chlorpyrifos and the relative invisibility of the health problems associated with it.       Nevertheless, these companies have lobbied the EPA to continue to use Chlorpyrifos in agricultural operations. This is why in 2007, environmental groups petitioned the EPA to ban its use in agricultural use as well. When the EPA dragged its feet, these groups approached the courts, which ordered the EPA to rule on the petition by March 2017.      The same logic holds in this case. When the EPA banned the use of Chlorpyrifos for residential purposes, this benefited a wide cross-section of people whose health might suffer if this chemical were sprayed on their lawns.

EPA scientist tracks the health of the ocean and other waterways

For some three decades, Darvene Adams has focused her attention on monitoring water quality and seeking to curb pollution in the ocean, bays, harbors and estuaries of the New Jersey and New York region. As a scientist for a regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Adams has been involved in numerous projects to test the health of waterways, measure the levels of contamination and determine the sources. “I am providing the data and information we need to make better decisions,” said Adams. “The information helps the public and policymakers figure out what the problems are and how to respond.” One innovative project has involved use of a 6-foot yellow submersible known as a Slocum Glider that resembles a torpedo with wings. For three summers, the glider has traveled the length of the New Jersey coastline and gone down to 120-foot depths to take readings of dissolved oxygen, salinity and temperature. The glider resurfaces every two hours, transmitting data to scientists who have been seeking to understand why the ocean tends to have low levels of oxygen, particularly in the summer. Low levels of oxygen can cause fish kills and algae blooms, creating great harm to the scallops, oysters, clams and other seafood harvested off New Jersey’s coast each year. ### Who is Darvene Adams?  **POSITION:** Monitoring Coordinator, Staff Scientist, Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2  **RESIDENCE:** South Plainfield, N.J.  **AGE:** 56  **EDUCATION:** B.S. Biology, Montclair State College. B.S. biology; Rutgers University, M.S. environmental science  **AWARDS:** EPA Bronze Medals and EPA Office of Research and Development Honor Award  **HOBBIES:** Genealogy and gardening  **VOLUNTEER WORK:** Church choir Adams said New Jersey has long considered its coastal waters to be “impaired” based on low amounts of dissolved oxygen, but she pointed out that this assessment was based on limited data. So far, Adams said, the extensive data from the glider has not found the oxygen levels to be as low as expected. She said sea life is thriving, and there is now a belief that some lower oxygen levels discovered in the summer months may be the result of natural occurrences, not pollution. Adams also has been involved in monitoring the impact of Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey and New York waterways, charting the flow of the millions of gallons of raw and partially treated sewage that was released before and after the storm. The effort is part of a study to assess the long-term effects of Sandy on the coastal waters in both states. In addition, she has worked on the regular assessment of the water and sediment quality of New York Harbor complex, has been deeply involved in the monitoring of the water quality of lakes, rivers and streams in New Jersey and New York, and has had exploring why Barnegat Bay, New Jersey’s largest estuary, has been invaded by jelly fish. She also has been involved with the EPA effort to use the International Space Station as a monitoring platform for ocean health. Randy Braun, the acting chief of the EPA Region 2 Monitoring and Assessment Branch, said Adams is creative, thorough, collects impeccable data and is always “thinking outside the box.” “She is always thinking of better ways to do things,” said Braun, “She is passionate about her work, loves the environment, wants to make it better and protect human health.” Adams said that she became interested in environmental issues while in college when she worked with a fisheries biologist who was involved in providing scientific evidence as to why a major highway project on the West Side of Manhattan that involved filling in parts of the Hudson River should not go forward. “This was one of the largest and longest New York City development battles and in the end, it was determined that it would cause irreparable harm to striped bass and the project was halted,’ said Adams. “It was inspiring to see government scientists, armed with scientific data and determination, `speak for the fish’ and help halt the project. I decided that EPA would be the place for me.” Adams said she initially worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Mass. studying aspects of fish stocks in the northeast Atlantic Ocean, and for the state of New Jersey revising water quality criteria. She started at EPA in 1983 as a summer employee taking ocean water samples, and has been there ever since. “I tell people I have my dream job. Every day I use my education and my skills to make the world a better environment for all of us,” said Adams. _This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to the Fed Page of The Washington Post to read about other federal workers who are making a difference. To recommend a Federal Player of the Week, contact us at fedplayers@ourpublicservice.org._ ****

Oil pipelines are not safer than transporting oil by train

The Post is correct that federal regulators must act to protect our communities, wildlife and natural resources from oil spills from trains [“Risky business,” editorial, May 5], but its prescribed fix of moving more oil by pipeline is like “curing” alcoholics by telling them to switch from beer to bourbon. More than 1.15 million gallons of crude oil spilled from rail cars in 2013, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. But that figure was nearly matched by just the top two of a series of oil pipeline spills last year: An 840,000-gallon oil pipeline rupture in North Dakota in October and the 210,000-gallon Exxon Mobil Pegasus tar sands oil pipeline disaster in Mayflower, Ark., in March. These aren’t rare occurrences — they’re tragically common. In 2011, an Exxon Mobil pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River, and in 2010, an Enbridge pipeline gushed 843,000 gallons into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The only way to cure our addiction to oil and reduce its tragic side effects is to use less of it. President Obama’s stronger fuel-economy standards are a good start, and he can send a clear message that the United States doesn’t intend to relapse by rejecting the dangerous, climate- disrupting Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. ****Felice Stadler** , Washington** The writer is senior director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Climate and Energy Program.

Andrew Beyer: Racing Commission’s thoughtful response to rash of horse breakdowns at Laurel Park

During a span of five weeks this winter, 10 horses were euthanized after breaking down at Laurel Park, and the racing community was understandably alarmed. Why were these catastrophic events happening at a track with a previously good safety record? People in the sport had reason to worry about its public image, too. In recent years, similar epidemics of breakdowns have occurred at Aqueduct, Del Mar and Arlington Park, and the tracks all received blistering coverage by the media. Aqueduct’s problems wound up on page one of the New York Times. The Maryland thoroughbred industry often appears dysfunctional, but in this case the Maryland Racing Commission responded promptly to a tough issue. A committee analyzed the breakdowns, interviewed the horses’ trainers and studied the animals’ medical histories. It wasted no time producing a report on its findings and last week made some thoughtful recommendations. Horse safety has become such a sensitive subject that nobody in racing likes to state one inescapable fact: Some fatalities are inevitable because thoroughbreds are fragile animals and the sport is dangerous. Fit, sound horses in the care of judicious trainers can break down, as Barbaro did in the 2006 Preakness, and there’s no way to prevent the tragedy. So a cluster of breakdowns may not have an underlying explanation; it may be a random concentration of bad events. After the commission completed its study, chairman Bruce Quade said, “There was no ‘Eureka!’ finding.” The Safety and Welfare Committee’s report presented abundant data to verify that the Laurel racing strip was not to blame. However, the report did note that six of the injured horses were running in $5,000 claiming races — the lowest level in Maryland. This might not be statistically significant, but common sense suggests that horses who have descended to the bottom of the class ladder have physical issues that make them vulnerable. The unlucky ones may fall into the hands of unscrupulous trainers who will risk running an infirm animal in order to win a purse. So the Commission decided that it could best protect horses by reforming some of the rules of the claiming game: ●A claimed horse who does not run for 180 days may race once at the level of his purchase price with an exemption from being claimed. This gives a break to horsemen willing to take their time in bringing an animal back from an injury. ●A horse who races within 30 days of being claimed must start for a pricetag at least 25 percent higher than his purchase price. This rule would discourage trainers from dropping a horse in class and running him back quickly to get a fast return on their investment. ●The Commission is considering a rule that would void a claim if the claimed horse breaks down in a race — penalizing the trainer who may have run an infirm horse rather than the unlucky trainer who bought him. ●It is also considering a limit on the size of purses in low-level claiming races, having learned a lesson from Aqueduct’s experience. The New York track’s rash of breakdowns in 2012 occurred after casino money had boosted purses to unprecedented levels. Bottom-level $7,500 claimers were competing for as much as $40,000 — an irresistible incentive for unscrupulous trainers to do anything in order to get a cheap horse to deliver a maximum performance. The New York Times headline summed it up: “Big Purses, Sore Horses and Death.” A comparable situation exists now in Maryland, where $5,000 claimers now compete for a purse of $17,500. Though horsemen will balk, of course, the Commission wants Maryland to emulate New York and reduce the ratio of the purse size to the claiming price. It is encouraging that the Commission took the lead on this issue and handled it so thoughtfully. Maryland racing faces a slew of other problems, but the track’s management and its horsemen have such a long history of hostility that they can rarely agree on anything. Since Quade became chairman last year, the Commission might play the role of a neutral arbiter. Unlike many of his predecessors, Quade is not a horse owner and has no stake in the game, except when he bets. He has been a racing fan since he started sneaking into Bowie Race Course as a teenager. He goes to the track two or three times a week, mostly at the Ocean Downs simulcasting facility. So he is well aware of Maryland’s problems, and he wants the Commission to get more involved in solving them. One of his top priorities: “We need to do something to stimulate the state’s breeding industry.” Quade has made the controversial proposal that some of the money allotted to purses be paid as awards to owners of Maryland-bred horses. (Trainers aren’t thrilled with this idea, because it would reduce their cut from a winning purse.) The health of the breeding industry is important to the entire sport. When Maryland’s thoroughbred farms were thriving, they provided many of the horses that gave the state a solid racing product. In 1991, more than 1,700 thoroughbreds were foaled in Maryland; by 2011, the number had dropped to 388. That’s one of the reasons that the quality of racing at Laurel has been so poor, with so many small fields and so many bottom-level claiming horses. When it was suggested to Quade that the issue of breeder awards was not within the purview of the racing commission, he objected: “Hell, yes, it’s in the interest of the Racing Commission to look at everything that affects this industry.” If that’s his philosophy, he won’t have any shortage of controversial projects to tackle. ****

Plastic microbeads from face wash are polluting river sediment

Tiny balls of plastic from cosmetic products are showing up in river sediment for the first time, mixing with the rocks and dirt that line the bed of the Saint Lawrence River. Because scientists have mostly been looking for these plastic pollutants in the surface water instead of in the dirt, it means that their build-up could be even worse than previously imagined -- and fish and other animals could be in serious trouble because of them.     Now, these researchers will dissect fish that live on the polluted riverbed to see if they've been eating the plastic particles. If the microbead build-up is getting into the fish food chain, it could be endangering their health.

The environmental downsides of genetically engineered crops

Regarding Chip Bowling’s Dec. 25 Local Opinions essay, “A cleaner Chesapeake through genetically engineered crops”: The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance is partially funded by Monsanto and DuPont, which are major sources of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and other crops designed to resist the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup). Genetically engineered corn and soybeans dominate U.S. production . Overuse of the herbicide on these vast monocultures has resulted in resistance in more than 35 species of weeds that invade the engineered “environmentally friendly” crops. Weeds must now be killed by higher concentrations and increased volume of more potent herbicides. Where runoff occurs, pollution will increase in surrounding waterways and rivers. Adverse health conditions have not been found from consumption of engineered crops, but the damaging effects of millions of gallons of herbicides on the environment should not be minimized. ****Roger Lawson** , Columbia**

By 2030, half the world’s oceans could be reeling from climate change, scientists say

More than half the world’s oceans could suffer multiple symptoms of climate change over the next 15 years, including rising temperatures, acidification, lower oxygen levels and decreasing food supplies, new research suggests. By midcentury, without significant efforts to reduce warming, more than 80 percent could be ailing — and the fragile Arctic, already among the most rapidly warming parts of the planet, may be one of the regions most severely hit.  Nearly all of the open sea is acidifying because of greenhouse gas emissions. But the researchers found that cutting greenhouse gas emissions could significantly delay future changes, giving marine organisms more time to migrate or adapt.  But she noted a warming climate could eventually cause changes in the ocean that have never happened before — hotter temperatures, lower pH or less oxygen than have ever naturally occurred. When this happens, some organisms may no longer be able to tolerate the changed conditions and will be forced to migrate, evolve as a species or face possible extinction.  “So we wanted to know when will climate change actually push the system outside the range of natural variability that organisms are used to,” Henson said. The researchers focused on four specific climate-influenced “drivers,” of marine ecosystems: temperature, pH, oxygen levels and “primary production,” or how much food is available to a community. Some parts of the ocean are already experiencing certain climate-driven changes beyond the limits of their natural conditions. The researchers note in the paper that 99 percent of the open ocean is experiencing a climate-driven change in pH, or ocean acidification. The subtropics and the Arctic are also experiencing sea surface temperatures beyond their natural ranges. And these changes will only continue to spread. Under a business-as-usual climate scenario, the researchers found an alarming portion of the ocean will be affected by changes in multiple drivers at once. By 2030, they projected, 55 percent of the world’s oceans will experience changes in more than one of these factors — temperature and pH, most commonly — beyond the range of natural variability. By 2050, this number rises to 86 percent. The researchers focused on areas where multiple changes are occurring at once. “We think that multiple different factors occurring at the same time probably have different responses in the marine environment than just one factor at a time,” Henson said. “So, for example, the combination of warming and ocean acidification may be even more detrimental than just one of those factors alone.” The projections suggest climate mitigation can stall these effects — at least for a little while. Under the moderate climate scenario, the researchers found, 34 percent of the ocean will be affected by changes in multiple drivers, and 69 percent by 2050. In general, they concluded that climate mitigation can delay the onset of climate-influenced changes by about 20 years. “Mitigation doesn’t stop the emergence of multiple different stressors in the ocean, but it does slow things down quite significantly,” Henson noted. This delay could buy time for organisms to move or adapt to their surroundings, the researchers said. Fast-moving fish may be able to migrate to more hospitable waters, while organisms with speedy generation times, such as plankton, may be able to quickly evolve to their changing environments. On the other hand, organisms in places with very stable environments and low natural variability in their conditions — the subtropics, for instance — may be especially vulnerable to future, climate-driven changes. Certain parts of the world are also likely to see more rapid changes than others. Their projections suggest that the Arctic will be a particular “hotspot” for changes in temperature, pH and oxygen content. Scientists are still struggling to figure out which organisms are mostly likely to adapt or move — and which are most likely to die. But they do know there are bound to be winners and losers and that some changes to marine communities are likely to be long-lasting, if not permanent — long after greenhouse gas emissions have been curbed.

Jeff Sessions wants to make illegal drugs less potent and more expensive. We’ve got some bad news for him.

While much of the speech was Sessions's standard law-and-order messaging, one line, about the role of the Justice Department in decreasing illicit drug use, really stood out: This is a standard supply-side anti-drug mantra: make drugs illegal, drive up their price, make them harder to manufacture and harder to get. Let's just check in on how that's going.   You see a similar, though less-pronounced trend when examining illicit drug purity. Here's heroin. The average purity of street-level heroin seizures rose from 10 percent in 1981 to 31 percent in 2012, a threefold increase. Again, most of that increase in purity happened during the tough-on-crime era of the ’80s and ’90s. In fact, heroin purity showed a steady decline throughout most of the 2000s, right when policymakers were starting to abandon the harsh rhetoric for more treatment-based options. By Sessions's goalposts of raising price and reducing purity, the Justice Department has been failing miserably at its job for much of the past 30 years. Now granted, giving Sessions the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he's aware of these trends and wants to reverse them going forward. But his constant invocation of the harsh drug rhetoric of yore suggests that'll be an uphill battle.   But with Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department, such policy is further away than ever. “It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal,” Sessions said before the DARE conference today. “We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse.”

This mystery was solved: Scientists say chemicals from fracking wastewater can taint fresh water nearby

The boom in unconventional drilling for natural gas known as fracking hit so fast that scientists have had to scramble to determine whether it’s safe for humans and the environment. Mostly they’re still trying to catch up. But a study by the U.S. Geological Survey appears to have answered a critical question about the millions of gallons of chemical-laced water that are injected into the wells to fracture rocks and release trapped gas. Is there any cause for concern when that water is stored later, whether in treatment facilities or special underground wells? The short answer is yes, said the study’s lead author, Denise Akob, a USGS microbiologist.  Upstream from the storage tanks, the waters of Wolf Creek tested normal. Downstream, there were detectable levels of chemicals that commonly lace fracking waste — barium, bromide, calcium, chloride, sodium, lithium, strontium. The report called the levels low, not enough to have a noticeable impact on marine life. But they did appear to have an effect on something that could be equally important. Communities of microbes that help support life were dramatically altered downstream. There was a lower diversity of the life forms downstream, “which could impact nutrient cycling,” a building block of life in the creek, the USGS explained in a statement that announced the study. “Water samples adjacent to and downstream from the disposal facility exhibited evidence of endocrine disruption activity compared to upstream samples,” the USGS explained. Long story short, endocrine disruptors can wreak havoc on the hormones of mammals. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed that includes bays, rivers, streams and creeks in six states and the District of Columbia, scientists have determined that endocrine disruptors have switched the testes of male smallmouth bass to ovaries. The finding about the microbes “gives us a sense that the communities are changing downstream,” Akob said. How exactly they don’t know. Science works slowly, and in this case it will likely take another years-long study to determine how. The current finding that the water chemistry is changing “is a first,” she said, opening a window of understanding where there was none. Hydraulic fracturing is rife in West Virginia, producing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater. In the Chesapeake Bay area, Pennsylvania is another state where fracking abounds, with wells being built to drill vertically a few hundred feet, then horizontally so that water can be injected into the hole to break apart shale and release gas. The practice is also widespread in Ohio, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, North Dakota and elsewhere. Scientists from across a range of federal agencies and universities are concerned about the chemical mixtures used to open the rock as well as the chemicals naturally trapped underground that now come to the surface. Oil and gas companies have refused to reveal what they use, saying the information is proprietary, like the secret ingredients used to make sodas. For that reason and others, Maryland, New York, New Jersey and numerous other states have either placed a moratorium on fracking or delayed it from ever taking place within their borders. On its website, the Environmental Protection Agency lays out its concern. Unconventional oil and gas extraction, or UOG, “can be generated in large quantities and contain constituents that are potentially harmful to human health and the environment,” it says. “Wastewater from UOG wells often contains high concentrations of salt content, also called total dissolved solids. The wastewater can also contain various organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, metals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials. This potentially harmful wastewater creates a need for appropriate wastewater management infrastructure and practices.” Oil companies are aware of the concern. They often truck water to public and private wastewater treatment facilities to manage the problem. In Oklahoma, the wastewater is sometimes poured into underground storage wells, a practice thought by many scientists to produce small earthquakes. At the West Virginia site, Akob and her researchers did not know where leaks might have occurred. They also found elevated levels of iron considered unsafe by West Virginia regulators, but that problem couldn’t be blamed on the wastewater because various mine excavations in the state have raised iron levels in many locations.

We trust dams and levees at our peril

_William Robert Irvin is president and chief executive of American Rivers._ Rivers are powerful things. They carve canyons, build deltas, shape landscapes, and sometimes overpower the dams and levees we attempt to use to control them, even with the best design and engineering. The dangerous situation that has developed at California’s Oroville Dam is a stark example of the power of a river. The damage at the nation’s tallest dam, which holds back the Feather River, has prompted the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people, many living behind vulnerable levees in the floodplain below. It is yet another warning that dams and levees are not always the answer, and that it is often more effective to work with nature than against it. The events unfolding at Oroville should come as no surprise. Conservation organizations raised concerns about the inadequacies of the dam’s spillways as far back as 2005, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the state of California failed to act. Nor is the deteriorating condition of Oroville Dam an isolated case. In fact, dams and levees across the United States are falling into dangerous disrepair. According to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, U.S. dams are degrading far faster than they are being repaired. By 2020, 70 percent of dams in the United States will be more than 50 years old. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s dams a D grade in its 2013 infrastructure report card, while levees earned a D-minus. Oroville Dam was completed in 1968, built to provide water supply, hydropower generation and flood control. Problems with dams like Oroville and the safety of downstream levees will get worse as our climate changes. Rain events will become more frequent and extreme; the recent rains that filled the reservoir behind Oroville Dam to near bursting were extraordinarily intense. To adapt to this new reality, we need to recognize that the old approach of constricting a river with dams and levees is often not an effective or economical way address to the threat of flooding. Indeed, to ensure public safety, we need to give rivers more room, not less. We must ensure that rivers have the adjacent floodplains and wetlands they need to move and dissipate floodwaters naturally. Dams and levees limit such options and often incentivize development and redevelopment in places most prone to damaging floods. We not only need to think twice before building dams and levees, we also need to be removing existing dams and levees that have outlived their usefulness and are threatening public safety by aggravating flood risk. We should avoid encouraging development in vulnerable floodplains and help people and communities move from unsafe, flood-prone areas. Giving rivers more room not only improves public safety, it also provides other benefits, such as clean water, open space and recreation for nearby communities, and habitat for fish and wildlife. Of course, the immediate priority must be the safety and well-being of those threatened by the problems at Oroville Dam. Public officials need to continue to do everything they can to keep the communities downstream of the dam safe over the next few weeks until the California Department of Water Resources is able to significantly lower the level of the reservoir or until the rainy season is over. Once the current crisis has passed, we need to ensure the highest level of safety and performance at Oroville and facilities like it across the nation. Longer-term, as the Trump administration and Congress decide how to address crumbling infrastructure, it is critical we make the right investments to ensure our rivers are healthy and our nation’s water infrastructure is safe. The lesson from the events at Oroville Dam is that we must work with nature, not against it. **Read more:** Lawrence Summers: The next president should make infrastructure spending a priority The Post’s View: Road blocks ahead for Mr. Trump’s infrastructure spending plans Letters to the Editor: Yes, America needs infrastructure spending. No, it is not a federal responsibility. Ronald A. Klain: Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. George F. Will: Infrastructure projects aren’t jobs programs

To make environmental groups more diverse, focus on poor communities

Regarding the Aug. 11 news article “Liberal environmental groups lack racial diversity, study says”: Environmental groups lack racial diversity because they give almost no attention to “environmental justice.” It is admirable to be concerned with our natural environment, but what’s left out is the “not-so-natural” environment that surrounds our poor communities . Facilities that people don’t want in their communities, such as landfills, sewage-treatment plants, fossil-fueled power plants, rail lines carrying hazardous substances, processing facilities, etc., are placed closer to the poorest and least powerful. If environmental groups want to become more ethnically diverse, they should also work on issues affecting the poor. ****Darrel Nash** , Bowie**

WSSC considers limits to horse riding, fishing at two reservoirs

As suburban Maryland’s water utility considers how to reduce sediment and pollutants in its two Patuxent River reservoirs, an outside expert has concluded that decades-old horse trails should be moved farther from the water and unauthorized shoreline fishing areas should be closed. People who use the reservoirs as lakes for boating also should be required to sign affidavits promising not to use their boats in other waterways, the consultant said in a report to the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. Doing so, the analysis said, would help ward off invasive species, such as zebra mussels, that can damage intake pipes at water treatment plants. The findings from a one-year study by EA Engineering, Science and Technology, based in Baltimore County, were released this week as WSSC considers how much access horseback riders, fishing enthusiasts, kayakers and picnickers should retain to WSSC’s 5,600 acres of woods and shoreline. “Without question, water safety and water quality are our top priority,” WSSC General Manager Jerry N. Johnson said in an interview. “To the extent we can accommodate recreational uses in the area, then we certainly want to do that.” The Rocky Gorge Reservoir, which straddles eastern Montgomery County and northwestern Prince George’s, and the Triadelphia Reservoir in Montgomery and Howard counties, provide drinking water for about 600,000 people in Montgomery and Prince George’s. Drinking water for the other 1.2 million people served by WSSC in both counties comes from the Potomac River, but the utility does not own or control the land around those reservoirs. WSSC officials have said that the utility has encouraged recreation on its land since the 1970s through permits ranging in price from $5 daily to $60 annually. The utility has issued about 5,600 recreational permits this year, officials said. The issue heated up in May 2011, when the WSSC suddenly forbade riding on equestrian trails at Rocky Gorge and prohibited all riding between Nov. 15 and April 1. Horseback riding has not been permitted at the Triadelphia reservoir since 1960, a WSSC spokesman said. Riding at Rocky Gorge is permitted only on a 10-mile stretch of a perimeter road, but riders have said that the steep, deeply rutted road is dangerous. WSSC officials have said that they had become increasingly concerned that horse waste and sediment running off the equestrian trails made the drinking water more difficult to treat. After objections from the local horse community, the WSSC commissioned the broader $225,000 study of all recreational uses. Johnson said he plans to issue new regulations by early March and that the WSSC’s board has approved $500,000 to carry out changes. Several people who use the reservoir and its shores say the large swath of woods and beautiful lake vistas provide a rare natural respite in Washington’s densely developed suburbs. About 22 horse stables in Laurel and Burtonsville depend on the Rocky Gorge equestrian trails, riders said. Ronald MacNab, who represents recreational riders on the Maryland Horse Industry Board, said the equestrian community felt vindicated that the consultant found that their trails caused significantly less sediment runoff than the road that WSSC has required them to use. Riders have an interest in minimizing sediment and pollution, MacNab said. “It’s our water, too,” said MacNab, who lives in Colesville. “We drink it, so we don’t want to be the cause of the problem, and we certainly want to be part of any solution.” MacNab said riders would like to serve as voluntary mounted patrols and have agreed that parts of the trail need to be moved farther from the shoreline. In addition to closing off unauthorized fishing areas to restore sensitive shoreline, the consultant recommended that the WSSC continue to forbid fishing between Nov. 15 and April 1, when the ground is most vulnerable to erosion. Mike Thron of Olney, who runs The Maryland Angler’s Network Web site, said he catches bass and crappies at the Triadelphia reservoir. Thron, who said he hadn’t seen the consultant’s report, said the fishing permit that WSSC requires already discourages many people from fishing there. “They seem pretty stringent to begin with,” Thron said. The study also found that the recreational areas needed more trash cans and that the perimeter road needed to be improved to allow emergency vehicles, particularly fire trucks, to get in. It also recommended that managed deer hunts continue. Fred Tutman of the nonprofit Patuxent Riverkeeper organization, which advocates for the river’s water quality, called WSSC’s closer look at the potential recreational effects “long overdue.” “It’s a beleaguered river system, so anything that takes some of the stress off that water system is a good thing,” Tutman said. “This is not a horse preserve. This is a water preserve. That is really its main reason for being.”

Educating and engaging citizens about the quality of their waterways

For two decades, Douglas Norton has been leading projects to protect the nation’s rivers, streams and lakes, working with states to improve water quality and finding ways to make information available to educate and engage citizens about the condition of their local waterways. Most recently, Norton, a scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led the creation and implementation of a mobile-friendly website called How’s My Waterway that provides public access to data on thousands of waterways and the health of watersheds across the country. “We were struggling to increase the public’s awareness of the status of their local waterways, and with the advent of computer and smartphone apps, we started thinking about opportunities to get this information in front of folks,” said John Goodin, chief of EPA’s watershed branch. “Doug grabbed hold of this concept and really was the driver behind connecting all of the right people to make this work.” Norton also developed the Watershed Academy, an online EPA platform that provides web-based training and live webcasts conducted by expert instructors on a number of topics, including low-impact development, the Clean Water Act and watershed protection and management. The audience for these online tutorials has ranged from interested citizens and college students to professionals working in the field, and engaged thousands of people worldwide since it was launched 19 years ago. In addition, Norton created the EPA’s Recovery Potential Screening website, which provides a systematic approach for comparing watersheds and identifying differences in how well they may respond to restoration. The web tool was developed to help states reduce pollution in impaired waters with regard to their Clean Water Act obligations, but can be applied to a wide range of other watershed activities as well. ### Who is Douglas Norton?  **POSITION:** Senior Environmental Scientist, Environmental Protection Agency  **RESIDENCE:** Arlington, Va.  **AGE:** 60  **EDUCATION:** Cornell University, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, B.S. in Environmental Education and M.P.S. in Natural Resources Policy and Planning  **AWARDS:** 2014 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals finalist; 2014 ACT-IAC Igniting Innovation Overall Award; 2013 Government Computer News Award; EPA Office of Water Science and Technology Award, 2012 and Ambassador Award, 2010  **HOBBIES:** Fly fishing, outdoor photography, birding, gardening and DIY home renovation  **VOLUNTEER WORK:** FArlington Neighborhood Conservation Advisory Committee “In some of my projects, I hope to help people better understand the condition of the environment and the benefits we get from it when it’s healthy,” said Norton. “In others I hope to make it easier, faster and more efficient to restore waterways that need attention.” Benita Best-Wong, director of the EPA’s Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds, said Norton is a “can-do person” who uses the latest in science and technology to communicate with state environmental officials and the public to advance the cause of clean water. “He can take an idea and turn it into something that works and that makes sense,” said Best-Wong. How’s My Waterway, Norton’s latest project, was formally launched in October 2012 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the landmark environmental law that includes a requirement for states to report information about waterway conditions to the EPA. Since its launch, the application has drawn tens of thousands of users. Those seeking information via computer, smartphone or tablet can check on any location in the U.S. by entering a zip code or place name and quickly receive a list of waterways within about five miles of the search location. Information is provided on each waterway, and technical users can follow links to online scientific assessment reports. In the past, the information on pollutants and restoration efforts had been stored only in databases that were hard for the public to access or understand. Like other agencies, EPA officials said they face a constant challenge explaining how they serve the public interest. Norton’s colleagues say How’s My Waterway typifies his ability to make the agency’s work understandable. “He has this tremendous technical depth, but he also thinks, ‘How can we use these tools?’” said Tom Wall, director of the EPA’s Assessment and Watershed Protection Division. “There are a lot of people who have good ideas. There are a lot of people who can build things. There aren’t many people who can think of an idea and then deliver.” Michael Shapiro, an EPA deputy assistant administrator, said people instinctively care about their waterways, and this online tool developed by Norton “lets them know what assessments have been done and what the problems are, and helps them take initial steps to get involved in the process of restoring the water or protecting it.” “One of the things we need in this country is involved citizenry to help localities make good decisions about managing their water resources, and just getting engaged in solving water problems. How’s My Waterway is an entry point for people,” said Shapiro. _This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to the Fed Page of The Washington Post to read about other federal workers who are making a difference. To recommend a Federal Player of the Week, contact us at fedplayers@ourpublicservice.org._ ****

For your own safety, please do not eat these fish from the Potomac

If you’re in search of some locally sourced fish, be selective about what you choose to consume from the Potomac River. American eel, carp and striped bass — which includes rockfish — caught in these waters have tested positive for elevated levels of toxic chemicals, according to an advisory this week from the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment. Specifically, these fish contain elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, a man-made chemical long banned in the United States that has been linked to cancer and other adverse health effects.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Our goal is to protect the health and well-being of our residents,” the agency’s director, Tommy Wells, said in a statement. “This advisory helps ensure that residents who enjoy fish from District waters are aware of the health risks associated with consuming certain fish species.” The advisory also suggests eating certain fish caught in city waters — sunfish, blue catfish, northern snakehead, white perch, largemouth bass, brown bullhead catfish and channel catfish — on a limited basis. The city’s environmental agency has been monitoring contamination levels since 1980 and notes that improvements have been made along the way. Recommended maximum consumption levels of sunfish and largemouth bass, for instance, have more than doubled since the first advisory in 1994. Read the full advisory here.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Manassas City Council to consider reopening Lake Manassas

The Manassas City Council is considering reopening Lake Manassas to the public for recreational uses such as fishing and boating. In a narrow decision, the council voted Tuesday to have staff members look at options for opening the lake for recreation. The staff is expected to study financial, operational, environmental and security issues associated with reopening the lake and to report back to the council in about six months. The city-owned lake, southwest of Gainesville in western Prince William County, supplies drinking water to about 100,000 residents of Manassas, Manassas Park and Prince William, officials said. The city had eliminated public access to the lake in the 1990s, and in 2004 adopted an ordinance that banned boating to protect the drinking water supply. In 2007, developer Brookfield Saranac sued the city, seeking access to the lake. The case was decided last year by the Virginia Supreme Court, which asserted that the city of Manassas has the authority to determine access to the lake. That decision opened the door for the discussion at the council’s work session Tuesday. Council member Marc T. Aveni (R), a proponent of reopening the lake, said that Lake Manassas could be the “crown jewel” of the city’s parks and recreation program, while other council members raised concerns about costs associated with the project and possible threats to the city’s drinking supply. “I believe it’s a resource that should be available to our citizens, and perhaps some others, for fishing, for . . . electric motor [boating], canoeing, kayaking,” Aveni said. “It’s a wonderful resource that’s nearby nature. I believe that the city would do well to look at ways that we could make that access available at the lowest possible cost.” Aveni estimated that the city is spending $80,000 to $100,000 a year in law enforcement costs “to keep people off the lake.” “My position would be that that money would be better spent finding some way to allow access to the lake,” Aveni said. Council member Mark D. Wolfe (R) disagreed, saying that Manassas residents would have to bear the capital and operational costs associated with opening the lake to recreation, and said he thought that most of the people using the lake would live outside the city. “I can’t conceive a scenario where the majority of the users of the lake . . . are going to be Manassas residents,” Wolfe said. “But with the city having ownership of the lake, we are likely to be the final, best source of funds.” “To be very honest, I’m not interested in providing benefits for the citizens of Loudoun County and Prince William County,” Wolfe said. Wolfe said that the city has other recreational needs, such as improved tennis courts and additional soccer fields, and that he would prefer to take a comprehensive look at those needs — including the lake — during the upcoming budget process. Mayor Harry J. “Hal” Parish II (R) said he could recall many years ago when the town of Manassas, before it was incorporated as a city, had a shortage of drinking water. The lake was developed in the 1960s, he said, to assure a reliable supply of drinking water for Manassas residents. “The first and primary responsibility for our lake, which belongs to the citizens of Manassas, is to provide quality drinking water at as low cost as we can try to provide it,” Parrish said. “I would be for opening the lake if we could . . . protect the lake absolutely and not have it cost the citizens of the city of Manassas a dollar.” Parrish said he was particularly concerned that swimmers or divers might introduce invasive species of freshwater animals into the lake. He cited as an example the nonnative, invasive zebra mussel, which was detected upstream of Lake Manassas in the Millbrook Quarry. The zebra mussels were successfully eradicated from the quarry in 2006, according to a report from Thomas J. Grizzard, director of the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory. Parrish read excerpts from a 2005 WTOP news report that described how a burgeoning population of zebra mussels can block water pipes. The report said that utility companies in the Great Lakes region had spent billions of dollars trying to eradicate the mussels. “For me, as a responsible fiduciary of the citizens of Manassas, I get very concerned about that,” Parrish said. John M. Weber, chairman of the Manassas Utility Commission, said that a vote to proceed was not a vote to open the lake. “We’re just looking to see if we have permission from a high level to get some answers to all the questions,” he said. “I also believe that a lake which is permitted for fishing is going to be better controlled than one that is not.” The council voted 3 to 2 in favor of Aveni’s motion to proceed with the study. Barnes is a freelance writer.

Invasive insects are ravaging U.S. forests, and it’s costing us billions

The study finds that the rate of these invasions is increasing, because it is fundamentally related to global trade, which keeps on growing — and that already, their “likely” toll is in the billions of dollars every year. “If you look at the accumulation of pests in our forests, it’s pretty clear to me that we’re not doing a sufficient job,” Lovett says. Indeed, the study calls these invasive pests the “most serious and urgent near-term ecological threat” to U.S. forests — which we rely on not only for cultural and recreational reasons but also to store carbon, filter water, host diverse biological life and much more. It also notes that species invasions are the only known threat “that has proved capable of nearly eliminating entire tree species, or in some cases entire genera, within a matter of decades.”  Such is the devastating power of a species invasion, and yet, the issue gets relatively little attention or resources. “The government responds to crises, like a forest fire, for sure,” Lovett says. “This is more of a slow-motion crisis. It’s probably the biggest threat to forest health in the country, but it unfolds very slowly, so it doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.”  This, in turn, imperils bird habitats and clears the way for sometimes invasive plants to take root. And that’s still just the beginning — hemlocks extend their growth over streams, providing cooling from the sunlight, which in turn creates fish habitat. So in a classic case of cascading negative effects within an ecosystem, fish like trout are also damaged by the loss of hemlock.  The study also finds that the most economically impactful damage often occurs in cities, not in the countryside, when invasive pests and diseases take out urban trees, damaging home values and triggering large repair and replacement costs. And Lovett notes that these estimates don’t even include many of the less tangible forms of damage that occur in cities whose trees are killed by invaders (trees have been repeatedly shown to have beneficial effects on human physical and mental health).    All of this should worsen, the research suggests — because invasions appear to be correlated with the growth of international trade. The paper therefore suggests the U.S. must get a great deal more defensive in its outlook toward the massive numbers of imported goods that carry with them a pest risk. The researchers in particular single out live plant imports — which number 3 billion per year — and wooden packing crates and pallets, which insects bore into. The study suggests going so far as banning wood packing materials entering the U.S. (among other policy possibilities), and strengthening of quarantine measures for live plant importations. “A lot of the attention is focused on stopping the spread of pests that are already here, but we really need to focus on stopping the next one, not the last one,” Lovett says.

How the drug war blocked research into a promising experimental PTSD therapy: ecstasy

Since 2001, 364,000 veterans have received treatment for possible post- traumatic stress disorder. Some researchers believe the vets could benefit from a drug called MDMA. For 30 years, the federal government has blocked research into MDMA because it is the active ingredient in ecstasy, better known as the party drug that fuels raves.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data," Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a retired Army psychiatrist, told The New York Times. "There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ecstasy first became popular among psychiatrists as a therapeutic tool after the Vietnam War. The drug, they found, made people more trusting and gave them the courage to talk about their pasts. They called it "penicillin for the soul." Yet no real research had been conducted on the drug. In 1985, the Reagan administration placed MDMA on Schedule I, declaring it an illicit substance without medical value despite the objections of an administrative law judge.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Since then, researchers have had a difficult time getting MDMA for use in clinical trials, and federal grants have been hard to come by as well. A not- for-profit organization in Santa Cruz, Calif. appears to be the only source of funding for studies right now. "Ecstasy is an illegal drug," a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs told the Los Angeles Times. The V.A. "would not involve veterans in the use of such substances."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Meanwhile, some veterans have been seeking out the drug on their own, desperate for relief from the psychological burdens of coming back from war. In a given year, 11 percent to 20 percent of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan experience PTSD, which can produce debilitating systems difficult to fully relieve.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico One study, especially approved by the Food and Drug Administration and published in 2011, found that five out of six victims of PTSD were cured after receiving the drug before two sessions with therapists, compared to only a quarter of those who sat through the treatment sessions after taking a placebo. There were no serious side effects.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The study involved only twenty patients total, most of whom were not veterans, and it was the first of its kind. Scientists still can't say with confidence whether MDMA could really help veterans, which, after three decades, is a shame -- especially given these very promising initial results and anecdotal evidence. Yes, the drug carries risks; so do the commercial antidepressants that so many veterans take to deal with the memories of war. Are these risks worth it for people who can find no other way of living a normal life? That's a question without an answer.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _Welcome to Wonkbook. To subscribe by e-mail, clickhere. Send comments, criticism or ideas to Wonkbook at Washpost dot com. Follow Wonkblog on Twitter and Facebook_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **What's in Wonkbook:** 1) Obama calls for strict net neutrality 2) Opinions: Voter suppression, Obamacare, immigration and wages 3) Administration cuts Obamacare forecast 4) A shake-up at the V.A. 5) Ebola doctor recovers, Hummers make a comeback and more    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ** _Number of the day:_** 609,000. That's how many people were arrested last year for simple possession of marijuana, according to the FBI's annual report. The figure has been declining over the past few years, but arrests related to drugs still represent one out of every eight arrests made. _Christopher Ingraham inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Correction:** An earlier version of this newsletter's number of the day inaccurately stated that one in every eight arrests is for simple possession of marijuana. That is the fraction of arrests related to all drugs, not just for possessing marijuana. Simple weed possession accounts for about half of those drug-related arrests -- 5.4 percent of all arrests. This version has been corrected.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **The president's statement calling for Title II regulation was his clearest yet.** "I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online," Obama said. He also said Title II could be applied to wireless providers. The cable industry objected, saying that the broad authority Title II grants the FCC is unnecessary. _Brian Fung inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **The proposal would mean regulating Internet connections like phone lines.** Advocates say that doing so would protect new companies from being shut out from access to consumers by high fees designed to prevent competition. Critics say that higher fees could allow cable companies to invest in the kinds of infrastructure and technology that would improve Internet quality for things like watching movies or calling your friends. _Tim Lee atVox_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **The FCC is worried about lawsuits from the cable industry.** Preparing for a likely legal challenge will take time, even if some advocates say that Title II is the safest legal option as well as the strictest. _Nancy Scola inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Ted Cruz calls net neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet."** Sen. John Thune also objected to the president's proposal. _Dustin Volz inNational Journal._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **KLEIN: No, there's no Obamacare for the Internet, but there could be a public option!** The Internet, just like the highway system, should be a government service provided universally, free of charge. Otherwise, natural monopolies, high fees and underinvestment are more or less inevitable. _Vox._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Ted Cruz is the Obamacare of nonsensical analogies." -- @obsoletedogma    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **ANDY KESSLER: Don't regulate Internet providers like Ma Bell.** The intricate regulatory regime for the old telephone company discouraged research and customer service. _The Wall Street Journal. _    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **WU: Obama realizes there's nothing to be gained from compromising on net neutrality.** The FCC chairmen he's appointed have tried unsuccessfully to seek a middle ground. The president seems tired of waiting for them to choose the right solution. _The New Yorker._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **RAMPELL: Voter suppression could already be deciding elections.** The governor's races in Kansas and Florida were decided by margins narrow enough that strict new requirements for voter identification could have changed the result. Of course, it will never be possible to say for certain how those who wanted to vote but couldn't due to the rules would have cast their ballots. That's precisely the problem. _The Washington Post_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **CHAIT: Yes, the _King_ case will kill people if it succeeds against Obamacare. **There are many people who will simply not survive without insurance. Conservatives could argue coherently that their deaths are necessary to pursue some larger end, but none of them seem honest enough to make that claim. _New York._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **BARRO: A death spiral in health insurance markets wouldn't make Obamacare unsustainable.** It would just make the law dysfunctional -- and dysfunction can be and has been sustained for a long time. _The New York Times._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **HSIA & IVEY: For-profit schools are abusing the new G.I. Bill. **Veterans who take out federal loans to attend for-profit colleges often get little in the way of education for their money. _The New York Times._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **BEINART: Obama should issue an executive order on immigration now.** Republican obstructionism will continue no matter he does, so he might as well do what he can to help undocumented immigrants. _The Atlantic._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **LEONHARDT: Democrats should support a tax cut for the middle class.** "How does the Democratic Party plan to lift stagnant middle-class incomes? I realize that liberal-leaning economists can give a long, substantive answer to this question, touching on health care costs, education and infrastructure. But most Americans would not be able to give a clear answer." _The New York Times._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Around 9 million to 9.9 million Americans will be enrolled by the end of next year through the exchanges.** The figures are lower than previous CBO estimates. "The developments are the latest sign that the law, which Democrats passed in 2010 to provide near-universal health insurance, is struggling to reach that goal quickly. Attracting new enrollees to the health law’s insurance exchanges has proven more difficult than advocates had predicted, and a slice of those who do sign up for plans haven’t kept up with premiums." _Louise Radnofsky inThe Wall Street Journal._ ****    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **The main question is how long it will take people to enroll.** Based on data from insurance expansions in other government programs, such as Medicare Part D, the administration thinks that it will probably take longer than three years for Obamacare to hit its full enrollment goals. _Jason Millman inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Republicans accuse the administration of lowering expectations as a political ploy.** "Despite the administration's habit of moving the goal posts, the fact is Obamacare is simply not delivering the results Americans were originally promised," Sen. Darrel Issa said. _Rachana Pradhan atPolitico._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **As many as 1,000 employees are facing disciplinary action after waiting lists were falsified.** The new secretary called the effort "the largest restructuring in the department's history," and said he plans to hire an additional 28,000 medical professionals. ****_E_ _mily Wax-Thibodeaux inThe Washington Post_ _._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **McDonald is also hoping to improve customer service.** The former Procter & Gamble chairman wants to streamline the V.A. bureaucracy, but Republicans in Congress are growing impatient with the slow pace of firings. _Russell Berman inThe Atlantic._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Veterans' organizations are also frustrated by delayed reforms.** Legislation passed this summer was supposed to make it easier for veterans to seek medical help outside the V.A. system. The department was supposed to issue each veteran a kind of insurance card , which they could present at private clinics and hospitals, but only some of the cards have been sent out. _Jordain Carney inNational Journal._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **New York's Ebola patient has been cured.** Dr. Craig Spencer, who caught the disease treating its victims in Guinea, has recovered. No one else was infected in New York. _Anemona Hartocollis in_ _The New York Times._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Hummers are back. Thank falling gas prices.** Lower oil prices will also stimulate consumer spending across a wide range of sectors, as prices for goods and services fall and people find they have more money in their checking accounts. _Chico Harlan inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **A lawsuit brought by two poker players raises new questions about highway interdiction.** Many police departments use a legal technique known as civil asset forfeiture to seize cash and property from citizens without charging them with a crime. In a lawsuit, the two men say police stalked them before stopping them on the highway, searching their vehicle without a warrant and taking more than $100,000 in cash. _Robert O'Harrow inThe Washington Post._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

ADHD drugs do not increase risk of heart disease in adults, study finds

**THE QUESTION** Might adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder face added risk for serious cardiovascular problems because of the medications they take — drugs that have been shown to raise blood pressure and heart rate? **THIS STUDY** analyzed data on 443,198 adults, 25 to 64 years old, including 150,359 who took ADHD medications, mainly Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Adderall (amphetamine) but also Strattera (atomoxetine) or Cylert (pemoline). In about a two-year period, 1,357 heart attacks, 575 strokes and 296 sudden cardiac deaths were recorded. However, the cardiovascular problems occurred at virtually the same rate among people who took ADHD medications and those who did not, regardless of people’s age, how long they had been taking the medication or which drug they took. **WHO MAY BE AFFECTED?** Adults with ADHD, who are reported to number more than 1.5 million in the United States and who account for nearly a third of all prescriptions for ADHD medications. **CAVEATS** Usage data came from electronic records of filled prescriptions; consumption of medication was not verified. The study did not determine whether dosage made a difference or whether use of the medications contributed to less severe cardiovascular problems. People 65 and older were not included in the study. **FIND THIS STUDY** Dec. 12 online issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (www.jama.com). **LEARN MORE ABOUT** ADHD at nimh.nih.gov/health and www.familydoctor.org. **— Linda Searing  ** The research described in Quick Study comes from credible, peer-reviewed journals. Nonetheless, conclusive evidence about a treatment's effectiveness is rarely found in a single study. Anyone considering changing or beginning treatment of any kind should consult with a physician.

Bridging the funding gap for the nation’s infrastructure

I hope the April 25 news article “63,000 bridges structurally deficient, U.S. says” grabbed readers’ attention. As a civil engineer who has been responsible for inspecting bridges, I think a lot about their structural integrity as I travel over or under them. I sometimes wish I had no knowledge of the problem. I am sure most people cross bridges every day without any consideration of their condition. Funding constraints limit the proper maintenance of bridges and, when necessary, their replacement. Also, the traffic on some bridges may far exceed what was anticipated when they were built. Do we really want to be driving our loved ones over bridges whose conditions are rated “poor or worse”? This is not a new problem for those of us involved with public infrastructure, but as time passes it is becoming more important that a dedicated funding source be found to address it. ****Adrian Fremont** , Annapolis**

Beware, good environmental news might be a pretext for more good news

Here is one of in infinite number of historical examples of how intelligent solutions can be, and have been, found to difficult environmental problems. And recent history has been a race between creating and solving our threats to our own environment. But what is astonishing about this example is not the progress being made in one area, but the fact that some people look at it and see it as a BAD precedent. The cleanup of the Chesapeake bay might “just the thin end of a wedge, and that the bigger target is a cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico marked by pollution that pours down the Mississippi River from farms in 31 states.” Now there’s a problem for you.

Lunch links: Unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences in wars on meth, MDMA

Regarding Earle Mitchell’s July 3 letter, I realize that potable water is a tremendous problem for much of the planet. However, I fail to see any logical connection between Canada, the nation with the most fresh water lakes in the world, its oil sands, and the rest of the world’s water problems, which are at least an ocean apart in either direction. Bert Wisner, Williamsburg

Report questions safety of rusting, crumbling railroad bridges

After a weekend in which two freight trains derailed, spilling their contents, an advocacy group’s report released Tuesday says bridges that carry dozens of those types of trains each day are in dangerous disrepair. Although neither weekend derailment involved a bridge, one resulted in the leak of almost 20,000 gallons of ethanol into the Mississippi River. Fear that a train could topple from a decrepit bridge to pollute a river or marshland led the Waterkeeper Alliance to begin inspecting rail bridges. The report says “citizen inspectors” who visited 250 rail bridges in 15 states found that 114 of them had deteriorated badly. In some cases, the report says, the inspectors were present when oil trains crossed the bridges and “observed flexing, slumping and vibrations that caused concrete to crumble.” The report calls for stronger federal oversight of the railroads that own an estimated 100,000 bridges in the United States. Congress in 2008 mandated that railroads inspect their bridges annually, subject to review by federal regulators. “When the railroads conduct bridge inspections and do find safety issues, federal officials do not need to be informed and have very little authority to compel rail bridge owners to make repairs,” Larissa Liebmann, a lawyer with the Waterkeeper Alliance, said in a conference call with reporters. Sarah Feinberg, the administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, admonished railroads last week to be more forthcoming about the condition of their bridges. “When FRA is asked about bridge safety, it’s frequently because the public or a member of Congress becomes concerned and has tried to get answers from a railroad, and they have been ignored or put off,” Feinberg said. “Now, I know that railroads are expending significant resources on maintaining bridges. I know that just because a bridge isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it isn’t in good shape and it isn’t going to remain in good shape for decades to come. But members of Congress come to the railroads to ask these questions; they are coming away unconvinced.” Feinberg is reviewing the parameters of the 2008 mandate for bridge inspections and may call for an FRA inventory of bridges if Congress provides the resources to conduct one. A spokesman for the Association of American Railroads said rail bridges were “among the safest segment of the nation’s infrastructure” and cautioned against judging a bridge by its appearance. “Some bridges are painted, some are not. Some are more weathered that others,” said Ed Greenberg, the spokesman. “Inspectors scrutinize a bridge to assess its structural integrity with no relationship to whether it’s aesthetically pleasing.” The conference call with the Waterkeeper group made clear its paramount concern: the cargo being carried by the trains. The boom in domestic oil production in the Bakken oil fields has caused the number of rail tank cars carrying flammable material in the United States to grow from 9,500 seven years ago to 493,126 last year. “The rails follow the rivers in this part of the country,” said Krissy Kasserman, the Youghiogheny riverkeeper in western Pennsylvania. “Oil trains here pass within a stone’s throw of several drinking-water intakes.” Those trains roll from the oil fields in North Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan to refineries on the East, West and Gulf coasts. On Saturday, a Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway locomotive pulling a mix of tank cars and automobile carriers derailed near Alma, Wis. Six tank cars were among the 25 that derailed, and five of them leaked ethanol into the Mississippi. The next day, 35 families were evacuated in Watertown, Wis., more than 200 miles from the first accident, when 13 tank cars of a Canadian Pacific train derailed. One car leaked oil. All of the U.S. derailments occurred in remote areas. But in July 2013, a runaway freight train in Canada carrying 74 tank cars full of Bakken oil derailed in the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, setting off a fire that destroyed 30 downtown buildings and killed 47 people. Nine tank-car derailments, including the two over the weekend, have occurred in the United States and Canada this year, with four resulting in explosions or fires. • Feb. 4: Fourteen tank cars carrying ethanol jump the tracks north of Dubuque, Iowa, and three of them burst into flames. • Feb. 15: Fire breaks out in a remote wooded area of Ontario after a 100-car train derails. • Feb. 16: Twenty-eight tank cars carrying crude oil derail and catch fire in rural West Virginia. • March 5: Twenty-one tank cars derail and leak crude oil within yards of a tributary of the Mississippi River in rural Illinois. • March 7: Five tank cars tumble from a bridge in Ontario, some of them on fire and some leaking oil into a waterway. • May 7: A 71-tank car train derails in Heimdal, N.D., and bursts into flames, forcing the evacuation of several dozen people from the unincorporated town. • July 16: A train hauling oil to a refinery on the coast of Puget Sound derails and spills 35,000 gallons about five miles east of the small town of Culbertson, Mont.

We can move forward with the Chesapeake Bay cleanup

Regarding William D. Ruckelshaus’s July 12 Local Opinions essay, “Why haven’t we cleaned up the bay?”: The Chesapeake Bay is one of the world’s most productive estuaries, environmentally and economically. But excessive pollution has impaired the resource. Mr. Ruckelshaus was correct that nonpoint source pollution — runoff from farms and forests, construction sites and city streets — has become the major challenge to cleaning up the bay. The region’s economic future is at stake. Thanks to states’ efforts and the Environmental Protection Agency, we’ve made significant progress since Mr. Ruckelshaus launched the bay cleanup in 1983. Applying further measures — more buffer zones, more trees, better land management — may prove disruptive to business as usual and will clearly entail costs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit recently approved the cleanup blueprint, which was challenged by homebuilders, farm bureaus and others. I trust this decision will get the bay cleanup back on track, help mandate needed pollution reductions among those responsible and spur cooperation among government, landowners, businesses, communities and others to meet the goal of a clean, healthy, productive Chesapeake Bay. Our leaders must ensure that this happens, for the benefit of those who depend on the bay for their livelihoods; for those who use it for recreation; for those inspired by its history; for future generations; and for the crabs, oysters and other wildlife. The country is watching to see if continuing actions to restore the bay match the rhetoric. ****William K. Reilly** , San Francisco** The writer was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1989 to 1993.

How to cope with urban flooding

The July 23 Economy & Business article “ Extreme weather brings . . . maggots, ” on the connection between climate change and urban flooding, is an important story .  Our organization cares deeply about the impact of increasingly severe rains on residents and businesses. It’s one of the reasons we developed our Rain Ready initiative. Our research shows that this kind of urban flooding is an equal-opportunity problem. It doesn’t matter what your income is. It doesn’t matter whether you live in a designated flood plain. Flooding happens everywhere. In cities and towns, impermeable surfaces such as concrete, glass, steel and even some suburban lawns leave nowhere for storm water to go. Solutions will require an integrated approach. States , local governments and property owners have a role. The plumbing retrofit described in this article is one way to implement the kinds of small-scale solutions that collectively can protect our investments and our environment from the impacts of climate change. ****Harriet Festing** , Chicago** The writer is water program director for the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Chris Cornell’s family believes prescription drugs may have caused his death

Chris Cornell’s family is disputing the findings of the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, which ruled that the Soundgarden frontman died from suicide by hanging.  According to the family, toxicology tests are necessary to give some insight into what may have spurred his actions. Cornell was in Detroit for a Soundgarden show when he died. He performed a concert Wednesday night then returned to his hotel room, where he was found unresponsive hours later. According to the statement, the family believes the prescription anti-anxiety drug Ativan may have had some role in Cornell’s death. “Some medical literature indicates that Ativan can cause paranoid or suicidal thoughts, slurred speech and impaired judgment,” the statement read. Cornell’s widow, Vicky, echoed this theory in her own statement, saying that the singer had acted normally earlier in the week but seemed  different when she spoke to him Wednesday. “When we spoke after the show, I noticed he was slurring his words,” her statement read. “When he told me he may have taken an extra Ativan or two, I contacted security and asked that they check on him. What happened is inexplicable and I am hopeful that further medical reports will provide additional details. I know that he loved our children and he would not hurt them by intentionally taking his own life.”

How much should Google and others police search results to stop illegal drug sales?

A consumer watchdog group is highlighting how dangerously easy it is to buy illegal steroids and prescription drugs over the Web with nothing more than a simple search. And it’s calling on Google to lead the way in hampering users’ online access to these drugs. But in wrestling with the question of how to curb this sort of activity, Web firms such as Google must also weigh another question: How much should any search engine censor its results? According to a report from the Digital Citizens Alliance,t search engines such as Google can profit from the illegal activity through Internet drug ads. When a user types terms such as “steroids without a prescription” in a search engine, for example, the results include links to sites advertising steroids or other drugs for sale online without a prescription. The DCA and some state attorneys general want Google to start cracking down on listing results from these kinds of queries on the Web and on its YouTube video site. They’re also urging search engines to stop the practice of placing advertisements on those search results. “Criminals essentially pay Google to market illegal and dangerous items,” said Digital Citizens Alliance executive director Tom Galvin. “It is almost like Google is getting a piece of the action. They make a fortune off of really bad people. I’m sure more than a few criminals are saying today ‘who needs Silk Road who you have YouTube?’” In a statement, YouTube outlined how it has been addressing the issue, saying that it takes user safety “very seriously” and has guidelines in place that prohibit content that encourages dangerous, illegal activity — including that which promotes the sale of drugs. “YouTube’s review teams respond to videos flagged for our attention around the clock, removing millions of videos each year that violate our policies,” the company said. “We also have stringent advertising guidelines, and work to prevent ads appearing against any video, channel or page once we determine that the content is not appropriate for our advertising partners.” A YouTube spokeswoman said the site has blocked ads on search results pages for several queries related to steroid use after ABC News reported on the issue last week. That report found that many of those drug-selling sites peddle fake drugs — some of which could not even be identified by labs that ABC News had hired. Internet access to illegal steroids has drawn particular worry for its potential impact on younger men. According to a study conducted by the DCA and the Taylor Hooton Foundation, 36 percent of males between ages 18 and 25 said they or someone they know had taken appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs. Don Hooton is president of the foundation, which is named for his son and dedicated to raising awareness about teen steroid use. Hooton, who says his son’s suicide at the age of 17 was linked to steroid use, is troubled by the ease with which young people can buy steroids online. “If a 16-year-old can use these engines to find these Web sites, then so can the management of Google and YouTube,” Hooton said. “And they don’t need to wait for someone to ‘report’ these sites to them before they are in a position to take action. Instead of this passive approach, they should be taking an active approach to making sure our children don’t have access to these sites via their engines.” But, Google has argued there are other issues that crop up when considering blocking search results, such as free speech. The company has said that it will block results only in narrow circumstances and that it’s up to lawmakers and the court system to weigh in on censorship issues. That’s the argument the search engine took when addressing requests that it refuse links to online pharmacies. “Search results reflect the web and what’s online -- the good and the bad,” the company said in a June blog post. “Filtering a website from search results won’t remove it from the web, or block other websites that link to that website. It’s not Google’s place to determine what content should be censored -- that responsibility belongs with the courts and the lawmakers.” Jim Hood, Mississippi’s attorney general and the co-chairman of the intellectual property committee for the National Association of Attorneys General, said that credit card companies have already agreed to work with law enforcement to crack down on these kinds of transactions. Hood said he has reached out to Google and Yahoo in the past on the issue of illegal drugs and counterfeit goods being sold on the Web and that he’d like to continue those conversations. He said he is drafting a letter with other attorneys general to invite Google to speak with them about how best to go after such illegal activity in a way everyone can agree upon. “Blocking is not a good word, but there are ways that they can stop steering people to an illegal site,” said Hood. “We attorneys general have a list of things they could do easily that wouldn’t hurt business model and would stop steering people to these kinds of sites.” Related stories: Controversial digital ad placement leaves tech companies scrambling _Follow The Post’s new tech blog,The Switch, where technology and policy connect._

Genetically modified crops are not the only solution

The Post asserted in its June 2 editorial “ Feeding the world ”  that genetically modified (GM) crop technology increases yields. This is still being debated. Recently published analyses suggest that GM technology has lowered U.S. yields. But that is not the only issue with GM technology. Many object to the idea of patenting life. As a letter signed by 800 scientists stated, “patents on life-forms . . . threaten food security, sanction biopiracy of indigenous knowledge and genetic resources, violate basic human rights and dignity, compromise health care, impede medical and scientific research and are against the welfare of animals.” Farmers have been sued or filed suit because possession of the patented crop, voluntary or not, is considered ownership or theft. Another concern is the increased use of herbicides and the impact this has on land, water and animals. The “superweeds” that have emerged in conjunction with GM agriculture require more toxic herbicides in addition to the already-increased quantity of traditional herbicide, glyphosate. Residue from these herbicides remains on the food. Areas where GM crops are plentiful and herbicides are being broadcast generously have seen deformity in amphibians and marked declines in insect populations. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: GM crops may not be evil incarnate, but they are not the end-all solution either. The issue is nuanced. ****Terri Glass** , Lovettsville**

Investigators’ report: 3 Amtrak workers in fatal crash had used drugs

All three of the people involved in a fatal Amtrak crash near Philadelphia last April tested positive for drug use, including the train’s engineer and two members of a railway work crew who both were killed, according to federal investigators. The engineer, Alexander Hunter, 48, who survived the crash, had used marijuana, investigators said. A backhoe operator, Joseph Carter Jr., 61, had used cocaine, testing showed. The supervisor of the work crew, Peter John Adamovich, 59, had used oxycodone, according to test results. Both Carter and Adamovich were killed when a southbound passenger train traveling at 106 miles per hour struck the backhoe as it was at work on an adjacent track, the National Transportation Safety Board said after the April 3 crash in Chester, Pa. The trio of positive drug tests were part of an alarming increase in drug use by railroad workers that was documented last year by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Nearly 5 percent of workers involved in accidents in 2016 were found to have used illegal drugs. The FRA reacted to the Chester crash by requiring that track-bed maintenance workers be included in the extensive drug testing program that has been in place for train crew members for more than 30 years. The fatal collision between Amtrak’s Palmetto train, with 330 passengers and seven crew members, and a backhoe being operated by Carter under Adamovich’s supervision, took place early on a Sunday morning. The southbound train departed Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station at 7:32 a.m. and was gathering speed about 18 minutes later as it began to pass through Chester. A massive cleaning machine had been sitting all weekend on track number 2, one of four tracks that pass through the area. That track had been shut down for the maintenance work. Carter and Adamovich had positioned their backhoe on track number 3, the one which Hunter’s train was roaring down at 106 miles per hour. Hunter told investigators he pulled the train’s emergency brake after “seeing something” on track number 3, but it was too late to avoid the crash. “Then, you know, once I realized like — I knew — like, I could see, like when I got closer, that [the backhoe] was pretty well onto my track and I — you know, I knew I was going to hit him,” Hunter told the NTSB investigators two days after the accident. “I could feel the train lift up, and . . . I just kind of curled up in a ball in the deck of the locomotive and waited for it to stop.” The engine derailed but remained upright. Hunter and 40 people on board were taken to hospitals with minor injuries. Release of the NTSB’s investigative docket Thursday will be followed at an as yet undetermined date by the board’s finding of probable cause for the accident. (The NTSB concluded that a post-accident test that found morphine in Adamovich was the result of the drug being administered when he was taken to a hospital emergency room.) The FRA knew by April that drug use among railroad workers was on the rise, but when tests on Carter, Adamovich and Hunter came back positive, alarm bells went off. In 2014, no one tested positive for drug use after a rail accident. In 2015, there were just two post-accident positives. Railroad workers are among the most heavily drug-tested employees in the country, faced with drug screening before they are hired, random on-the-job testing and another round of testing every time they make a significant mistake. After several years in which heroin and illegal opioid use had increased in the general population, it was evident that use of those and other drugs was on the rise in the railroad industry. In approximately 50,000 random tests each year, there had been no appreciable increase since 2009. But that changed abruptly in 2015: Random tests of railway workers — including engineers, train crew and dispatchers — found drug use had soared by 43 percent. Then-FRA Administrator Sarah E. Feinberg reacted swiftly to that news. She summoned the heads of the nation’s passenger and freight lines to a closed-door session in Washington last year, laying out her concerns and asking for their help in combating the swelling problem. Feinberg had a similar meeting with rail union leaders and then relayed her concerns to the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee. She also issued a rule requiring maintenance workers like Carter and Adamovich be added to the list of railroad employees subject to drug testing. When the railroad industry asked for a one-year delay in the testing program — saying they were concerned over whether it covered contract workers — Feinberg denied the request. Feinberg also instigated a decertification process against Hunter that would prevent him from operating a train again. Federal regulators generally defer to the railroad in such situations, allowing it to discipline or fire workers after positive drug tests. But that process can become entangled union contact rules, so the FRA moved ahead with decertifying him to ensure he could not operate a train again. Hunter spent 17 years operating trains, most of that time with New Jersey Transit, followed by two years at Amtrak. When asked if he was still with the railroad, Amtrak responded with a statement that said: “Drug use in the workplace at Amtrak is unacceptable and is not tolerated,” but did not respond to that direct question. The derailment was about 25 miles from the North Philadelphia location where a May 2015 derailment killed eight and injured more than 200. The 2015 crash, though drug and alcohol use were not a factor, prompted questions about the safety of the country’s aging rail infrastructure. The train in that incident sped up from 70 mph to more than 100 mph in less than a minute before derailing. It was one of the deadliest crashes ever to occur in the Northeast Corridor, the heavily trafficked Amtrak route stretching from Boston to Washington.

Jeff Sessions personally asked Congress to let him prosecute medical-marijuana providers

That research strongly suggests that cracking down on medical-marijuana laws, as Sessions requested, could perversely make the opiates epidemic even worse. In an email, John Hudak of the Brookings Institution characterized the letter's arguments as a "scare tactic" that  "could appeal to rank-and-file members or to committee chairs in Congress in ways that could threaten the future of this Amendment."   Through a spokesman, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said that "Mr. Sessions stands athwart an overwhelming majority of Americans and even, sadly, against veterans and other suffering Americans who we now know conclusively are helped dramatically by medical marijuana."

Jeff Sessions isn’t making America safer. He might be making it more dangerous.

Don’t believe it. Between 2009 and 2014, crime fell to its lowest level in a generation, even while prosecutors pared back their use of strict federal penalties. Sessions’s new policy will reverse that progress. While it may fill our prisons, it won’t “make America safe again.”     Lower-level offenders — the type of nonviolent drug users spared under Holder — are poised to bear the brunt of this expansion. Justice Department officials have hinted for months they’re planning a crackdown on marijuana, even in states where the drug is legal.   For anyone concerned about the fairness of our justice system, this is a true crisis. But the attorney general can only use (or abuse) the power Congress gives him. And there are a few ways lawmakers can rein Sessions in.  To be sure, in some cases, such as particularly serious and violent crime, incarceration and longer sentences may be warranted. And some cities, like Chicago, are seeing a troubling increase in violence. But Sessions’s directive goes far beyond reason and risks reigniting the same, misguided “war on drugs” that brought the nation’s criminal justice system to this crisis point, without doing anything to enhance public safety. Sessions’s arguments to the contrary should be dismissed for what they are: more of the Trump administration’s standard mix of half-truths and innuendo.

Richard Feely: Researching ocean acidification and prompting leaders to act

Every day, the oceans absorb 22 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, acidifying the water and threatening the marine ecosystem and the welfare of coastal communities and businesses tied to the health of the sea. Richard Feely, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has done pioneering research demonstrating the ecological damage to the oceans and sea life from carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from human activity. He has made policymakers aware of the consequences, helped contribute to federal legislation and created an international observational network to track the effects of these emissions on the oceans, coastal areas and estuaries. “Richard Feely has been a tireless leader and advocate for the recognition of ocean acidification as an ecological problem of global significance and of potentially catastrophic economic consequences,” said Dennis Moore, the leader of the Ocean Climate Research Division in NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. After more than 1,000 days at sea on more than 50 scientific expeditions, Feely, based in Seattle, has found that an increase in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, factories and agricultural activities has dramatically changed the biology and chemistry of the oceans. He has predicted that if this trend continues, the acidity of the world’s oceans will double by the end of the century and severely affect the marine environment. Feely has “significantly raised the bar by connecting our human actions to how the planet responds,” said Keith Phillips, a special assistant on climate and energy for Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee. “He has worked hard to make information understandable to policymakers and the public.” Feely’s breakthrough studies found that under some conditions, acidified water “eats away,” or corrodes, calcium carbonate minerals that organisms, such as oysters, clams, scallops, lobsters, crabs, shrimp and sea urchins, rely on to build their protective armor of shells and exoskeletons. He also discovered that shellfish along the West Coast of North America are already experiencing significant biological effects, and the increased acidity worldwide could adversely affect coral reefs and many species of fish. As a chemist, Feely understood how the overload of carbon was changing the fundamental chemistry of the ocean, and he applied that information to show how this affected marine organisms and hurt their ability to thrive. “He put the two pieces together,” said Christopher Sabine, director of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Laboratory. “He created a whole new field of study.” It is extremely difficult to introduce a new area of research, Sabine said. “Prior to Feely’s research, the understanding was that ocean acidification was not a concern. People thought marine pollution from runoff such as fertilizer and from overfishing were the key issues,” he said. Within the scientific community, Feely’s “ability to make very high quality, very precise measurements is one of the reasons there is great respect for this work,” said Scott Doney, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “He keeps breaking the mold. He’s the one defining what the next challenge is and what we need to be working on.” His work and testimony before Congress provided a foundation for the 2009 passage of the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act, which established a national research and monitoring program on ocean acidification at NOAA and called for the development of strategies to conserve ecosystems at regional and national levels. In 2012, Feely helped create an international research group, the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network, to improve the understanding and impact of ocean acidification. He also devised programs to monitor CO2 concentrations off the coast of Washington state and to assess the effect on shellfish in the region. Armed with this information, shellfish hatcheries in the state can now determine when it is safe to take sea water from the ocean for use and when it’s too acidic. “He helped the governor’s office understand how changes in our estuaries were partly due to local carbon emissions,” Phillips said, “He took broader global issues and brought it back home. He identified how to eliminate the local contribution to the problem.” Feely has worked at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory for the past 41 years. While much of his initial research began in local waters, his scientific projects have been global, and his mission has been to inform the public and policymakers about the current and looming dangers. “One in every seven of us gets most of our protein from the sea. Because of that, food security is a major issue for our planet,” said Feely. “We have a choice—continue to use fossil fuels or look for other sources of energy. We need to preserve our way of life and protect our planet. We need to think carefully because losses of critical species will result in major changes in the way we live.” _This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to the Fed Page of The Washington Post to read about other federal workers who are making a difference. To recommend a Federal Player of the Week, contact us at fedplayers@ourpublicservice.org._

Experts: Officials missed signs of prescription drug crackdown’s effect on heroin use

From the beginning, the U.S. government’s decade-long crackdown on prescription drug abuse has run an unsettling risk: that arresting doctors and shuttering “pill mills” would inadvertently fuel a new epidemic of heroin use. State and federal officials have pressed their campaign against prescription drug abuse with urgency, trying to contain a scourge that kills more than 16,000 people each year. The crackdown has helped reduce the illegal use of some medications and raised awareness of their dangers. But at the same time that some pain medications have become less available on the street and pricier, many users have switched to cheaper heroin, since prescription pills and heroin are in the same class of drugs and provide a comparable, euphoric high. With the nationwide heroin problem gaining greater attention after the recent death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from heroin and other drugs, experts on addiction say the government’s actions contributed to the problem it is now confronting. The war on drugs, they say, is an unwieldy conflict where targeting one illicit substance can be an unintentional boon to another. “Absolutely, much of the heroin use you’re seeing now is due in large part to making prescription opioids a lot less accessible,’’ said Theodore Cicero, a psychiatry professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He co-authored a 2012 study, cited in the New England Journal of Medicine, that found that a reformulation of OxyContin to make it harder to abuse caused heroin use to nearly double. Although policymakers “did the best they could at the time” in fighting prescription drugs, Cicero said, “t ****here were signs years ago that this was going to happen, and there was just a lot of inaction.” He said the government could have acted sooner to mitigate heroin’s toll, such as by promoting the use of medicines to fight overdoses and ease withdrawal symptoms. The government itself predicted that targeting prescription drugs could give heroin use an unintended lift. The Justice Department’s drug intelligence arm in 2002 highlighted the potential consequences: “As initiatives taken to curb the abuse of OxyContin are successfully implemented, abusers of OxyContin . . . also may begin to use heroin, especially if it is readily available, pure, and relatively inexpensive.’’ Yet those projections did not factor into discussions by top drug policy officials, even after numerous government reports and congressional testimony indicated that the shift to heroin was happening, according to current and former federal officials. Heroin use began to rise at the end of the Bush administration and has surged in the Obama years. John Walters, who ran the Office of National Drug Control Policy as President George W. Bush’s “drug czar,’’ said he doesn’t recall “anyone raising’” the prescription drugs-heroin link, though the reports warning of the link were screened by people in his office. “The heroin problem was getting better, and the real issue was the growth of pharmaceuticals,” he said. Gil Kerlikowske, who took over as President Obama’s drug czar in 2009, said the connection between prescription drugs and heroin “was not on the radar screen” during most of Obama’s first term and that he “didn’t do everything I should have” to raise awareness of the growing heroin problem. Now, he said, heroin is a “much larger concern.” Between 2007 and 2012, heroin use rose 79 percent nationwide, according to federal data. Within the same period, the data show, 81 percent of first-time heroin users had previously abused prescription drugs. The likelihood that many prescription-drug abusers will switch to heroin because it is much cheaper is widely accepted among addiction treatment professionals and law enforcement officials. Justice Department officials reject any direct linkage between the crackdown on prescription drugs and rising heroin use, although it was a Justice Department unit — the National Drug Intelligence Center — that warned that the campaign against illegal use of prescription drugs was fueling heroin use. The center, which closed in 2012, was separate from the unit employing prosecutors and agents who fight drug use. Moreover, these officials defended their fight against prescription drug abuse, saying those efforts prevented numerous overdose deaths. Even with heroin use on the rise, they said in interviews, it still represents a much smaller problem than prescription medications. Heroin kills about 3,000 people a year, less than a fifth of the toll from prescription drug abuse, government data show. Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who runs the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Diversion Control, denied that the spike in arrests for prescription drug misuse has affected their cost and driven users to heroin, saying street prices have been generally stable. “I don’t think one thing has anything to do with the other,’’ said Rannazzisi, who emphasized that the move against prescription pills saved many lives. The DEA is part of the Justice Department. Tristram J. Coffin, the U.S. attorney for Vermont, who has been a leader in the battle against prescription drug abuse, also remains a staunch defender of that campaign. “Prescription drugs are incredibly addictive, incredibly lethal, and we had to deal with them,’’ he said. But Coffin acknowledged that the crackdown made some doctors reluctant to write prescriptions for pain medications. “That in turn causes people, because they have an opioid dependency, to turn to heroin,’’ he said. In 2010, Justice Department officials told The Washington Post that a federal probe of prescription drug abuse in Northern Virginia, the nation’s largest such investigation at the time, had caused black market OxyContin prices to nearly double. Police and addiction treatment professionals in three states said last week that actions such as closures of “pill mills” that dispensed massive amounts of pharmaceuticals had made them harder to get, raising their price as demand outpaced supply. Still, “I can’t recall anyone at any point having a plan that would have limited the shift from prescription drugs to heroin,’’ said Marvin D. Seppala, chief medical officer at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, a network of drug treatment centers. It was without controversy that the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in 1995. The powerful drug was a godsend for millions of pain sufferers. Within a few years, however, authorities learned that addicts were crushing the time-release tablets and snorting or injecting them, leading to property crimes and overdose deaths. A crackdown began at the end of the Bill Clinton administration and escalated under the George W. Bush administration, which dispatched anti-drug agents and encouraged state monitoring programs that detect suspicious prescriptions. Federal arrests for illegal use of prescription drugs skyrocketed more than 900 percent between 2001 and 2007, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. During the same period, federal heroin arrests fell 32 percent as heroin use was generally stable and even declined among adolescents, said the center’s reports, which cited DEA arrest data. Bush administration officials said they targeted the more pressing threat. “Oxy was extremely accessible,’’ said Paul J. McNulty, a former U.S. attorney in Alexandria and deputy attorney general. “At the same time, many of us involved in drug policy from the 1980s onward saw heroin on the decline for a long period.” Throughout the Bush administration and afterward, nearly every year between 2002 and 2011, the Justice Department’s drug intelligence arm warned that the crackdown could drive drug abusers to heroin. As early as 2003, the center said, some Oxy users were already making the switch. “Not only is heroin less expensive, but efforts to control the diversion of OxyContin may be reducing the availability of OxyContin in some areas,’’ it wrote that year. The concerns were echoed in congressional testimony starting in 2008, transcripts show. Michael F. Walther, the drug center’s former director, said the reports were read in advance by officials at the DEA and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “It never crossed anyone’s mind that cracking down on Oxy would lead to an increase in heroin,’’ said one current federal official involved in anti-drug enforcement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. When President Obama took office, his administration also tackled the epidemic in front of it. “Prescription drugs were much more of a priority” than heroin, said Timothy Condon, who was a senior science policy adviser in the the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2010 and 2011. As heroin use rose in recent years, the government began reacting. Since 2009, the DEA has widely circulated a slide called “circle of addiction” that shows the linkage between pain medications and heroin. Heroin trafficking cases rose 52 percent between 2008 and 2012, federal data show. And the drug czar’s office, which has publicly warned about the link between prescription drugs and heroin for the past several years, has begun a number of anti-heroin initiatives. The administration supports the use of naloxone, an anti-overdose medicine, and drugs such as methadone that help ease heroin withdrawal. There’s no missing the toll of heroin any more. “Heroin is taking up a lot more of our attention and time,’’ said Kerlikowske, who said other measures targeting heroin are in the works. Experts praised the recent steps but said they should have come much earlier. “The intent was good, but someone, somewhere, should have thought it through to say ‘now we’re going to have a flood of heroin overdoses,’ ’’ said Jim Takacs, executive director of the Licking County Alcoholism Prevention Program near Columbus, Ohio. He said the state’s recent crackdown on pill mills has driven the price of prescription medications “way up” and caused heroin abuse to spike. “They should have known,’’ Takacs said.

Exploring the deeper issues we face

What a timely juxtaposition of front-page articles in the Jan. 3 paper. Top left: a story about our crumbling infrastructure for drinking water and wastewater treatment [“U.S. water and sewer systems tapped out”]. This is old news, sad to say: We’ve been struggling to fund clean water projects in a timely fashion at least since the 1950s. And Ross Perot’s 1996 vice presidential running mate, Pat Choate, summarized the dilemma neatly in his book “America in Ruins.” On the left, below the fold: yet another story about how the Environmental Protection Agency has allegedly over-regulated local development through its enforcement of the wetlands protection provisions of the 1972 Clean Water Act [“Case ignites conservative ire over EPA”]. And on the right, below the fold: a healthy discussion about the different strains of environmentalism, with a focus on the interventionist perspective [“At the helm of ‘Spaceship Earth’ ”]. Three excellent articles on the need for us, as a society and civic culture, to focus on a truly “conservative” agenda of economic, social and political changes for a sustainable future. Quite a contrast to the bubbly “fizz” of the articles on the Iowa caucuses, which occupied the rest of Page A1. Thanks for giving your readers a chance to think about the deeper messages of our current situation. ****Andrew Stevenson,** Alexandria**

Will decriminalization solve the drug scourge?

Illegal drug use and trafficking have led to a multitude of ills in the United States, sometimes because of racially infected law enforcement, particularly in black neighborhoods. But is decriminalizing small amounts of narcotics at least part of the answer to the scourge? Two major human and civil rights organizations make a good case for it and advance the decriminalization discussion in a report released Wednesday. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are engaged in a major push to change the way federal, state and local governments deal with drug enforcement and abuse.  The 196-page report says “criminalizing drug possession has caused dramatic and unnecessary harms,” particularly in the African American community, where severe enforcement racial differences cannot be justified by disparities in use. Police often search out drug crimes aggressively “and they do so selectively,” the study found, “targeting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color” with “devastating consequences.” The call for decriminalization goes well beyond efforts involving marijuana that are spreading around the country. ACLU and HRW want all drugs, even the hard stuff like heroin, decriminalized. “To be clear, we are not encouraging people to go out and use drugs,” said Tess Borden, primary author of the report. “What we are saying is that people shouldn’t be arrested, prosecuted, and potentially incarcerated — and saddled with all the consequences of a criminal record — for personal drug use, i.e. decisions about what they put in their own bodies.” If some drug use leads to criminal activities, then those actions can be prosecuted just as is done with alcohol, she added. Jerry Bennett, an alias used in the report, became one of the statistics in New Orleans last year when police found a half-gram of marijuana in the backseat of a truck where Bennett was a passenger. Facing 20 years incarceration had he gone to trial for that small amount of reefer, he thought about his 3-year-old daughter and all her birthdays he would miss. So he copped a plea and took a 36-month sentence, getting out in 14. “Imagine me in here for 20 years,” the report quoted Bennett. “They got people that kill people. And they put you up here for half a gram of weed.” In fact, in many cases, people who kill people get out in less than 20 years. But Bennett’s case is another in a long list illustrating the often biased, counterproductive way federal, state and local governments deal with drug crimes. Fourteen months doesn’t sound like much given what Bennett was facing. But should he have been locked up at all? Would he have received the same sentence if he were white? Information in the report points to the same answer for each question — no. The report’s overarching recommendation for Congress: “decriminalize the personal use of drugs, as well as possession of drugs for personal use.” But until then, the report calls on the federal government to: The White House promoted its approach toward reducing the use of illicit drugs when asked about the report, but it did not address decriminalization directly. “The Administration has been committed to implementing a balanced approach to drug policy from the beginning because we cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem,” Mario Moreno, press secretary for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, wrote in an email. “Public health and public safety collaboration is imperative to achieving this goal, which is why we’ve prioritized reforming our sentencing policies so that scarce resources are applied in the most effective ways, supporting evidence-based alternatives to incarceration that mitigate risks to the general public and reduce recidivism, and ensuring access to evidence-based treatment.” Obama administration officials have worked to expand drug courts and other programs that divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison, Moreno added. The tough lock-’em-up approach “has yielded few, if any, benefits,” according to the report. “Criminalizing drugs is not an effective public safety policy. We are aware of no empirical evidence that low-level drug possession defendants would otherwise go on to commit violent crimes.” If other arguments fail, there’s always the financial angle. “The enormous resources spent to identify, arrest, prosecute, sentence, incarcerate, and supervise people whose only offense has been possession of drugs is hardly money well spent,” the report says, “and it has caused far more harm than good.”