Many of us have been aware of the dangers in our food, including salmon. We’ve been educated on the health concerns of farmed salmon given its contaminants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and several chlorinated pesticides. We’ve also learned that toxic contaminants from oceans can still harm the wild fish as well. But what many of us weren’t prepared for was salmon filled with drugs like Prozac, Advil, Benadryl, Lipitor, and even cocaine.

This is the case for Puget Sound salmon. These drugs, and dozens of others, are showing up in the tissues of juvenile chinook as a result of tainted wastewater discharge. The estuary waters near the outfalls of sewage-treatment plants, and effluent sampled at the plants, were the shocking discovering of cocktails of 81 drugs and personal-care products, with levels revealed to be among the highest in the nation.

This is a growing concern, not just in the United States but in Canada as well. What are we doing to our planet?

The samples, which were gathered over two days in September 2014 from Sinclair Inlet, near the mouth of Blair Waterway in Tacoma’s Commencement Bay, detected other common drugs as well. These include flonase, aleve, tylenol, paxil, valium, zoloft, tagamet, oxycontin, darvon, nicotine, caffeine. There were also fungicides, antiseptics and anticoagulants, along with cipro and other antibiotics.

The levels may be so high as a result of people in this area using more of the drugs detected. It could also be the result of wastewater-treatment plants’ processes, according to Jim Meador, an environmental toxicologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle and lead author on a paper published this week in the journal Environmental Pollution.

“The concentrations in effluent were higher than we expected,” Meador explained. “We analyzed samples for 150 compounds and we had 61 percent of them detected in effluent. So we know these are going into the estuaries.”

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