by Amanda Horst

Created on: August 19, 2008

According to recent reports on CNN, Fox News, and other organizations that claim to report the news; our tap water has small "trace" amounts (amounts that experts [what they have an expertise in was not revealed, but one would hope environmental engineering] say are not harmful, and that the content would not show up in a urine analysis test) of prescription drugs like anti-depressants, Viagra, anti-anxiety medication, blood pressure medication and other goodies your teenager is probably popping as you read this. Now you may be asking yourself, "How did these prescription drugs get into my tap water?". The answer is: urine. Yes, urine. Toilet water is recycled into drinking water (and I'm not saying that recycling water is a bad idea, because it's not) through the miracle of sewage treatment plants. Our modern American culture is so heavily medicated it was only natural that these controlled substances would eventually show up in our tap water. My initial response to the idea that I was drinking down someone's Prozac, was to go out and buy a water filtration system. This worked pretty well on changing the taste of the water (which in the town that I happen to reside in is rather brassy with a brassier after taste) but had no bearing on the removal of the drug content according to CNN's resident water expert. I then started buying bottled water. Another author wrote in the "tap" side of the argument that a lot of bottled water is just filtered tap water. This is true, but easily avoided if you read the label of the water. Bottles of spring water tend to advertise loudly what spring and where their spring water was harvested. The water tasted better than the tap water though comparable to the taste of the filtered tap water (if you care about the taste of water) and I was able to drink it with the comforting thought that it didn't have any bleach or heart medication in it. A negative started to occur to me and I had to add it to my "pros and cons" list and something that is very important to me as well, are the environmental repercussions to buying bottled water. Plastic sits in a landfill basically until Armageddon. Which is why (and how I justified it to myself) recycling is not important but vital. I guess the point is, that I prefer spring water (it feels very pretentious to write that) for the aforementioned reason, though I don't think I could ever begrudge anyone wanting to drink tap water, purified or not.

Learn more about this author, Amanda Horst.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.