Drug use in Athens soared after economic crisis

Abstract

In Greece, the economic situation has been dire in recent years: Unemployment is near 30%, and public spending has been slashed because of austerity measures imposed by the European Union. A new study looking at the Greek capital’s wastewater shows how the public has responded to the societal stress: The use of many legal and illegal substances—particularly antipsychotics and antidepressants—has skyrocketed since the EU bailout plan took effect in 2010 (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b02417). Nikolaos S. Thomaidis of the University of Athens and colleagues collected wastewater samples from Athens’s treatment plant for about a week each year from 2010 to 2014. Then they used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to screen for 148 legal and illegal drugs and their related metabolites. The team found huge increases in the levels of antipsychotics (35-fold), benzodiazepines (19-fold), and antidepressants (11-fold), correlating with the fall of Greece’s gross domestic product and the