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Zuska at Thus Spake Zuska: Isn’t Rape Really Just All About Sex?

When douches like hibob are trying to figure out what “causes” rape, they would do well to remember that rape – more accurately, sex crimes and sexual battery – have myriad manifestations and causes.

Lawrence Haddad at the Guardian: Comment is free: The best ways to deliver overseas aid are often not easy to measure

Helping communities report on whether the aid reached them is a good contribution to fixing the broken feedback loop in international development and to reducing waste and corruption. But asking these communities if the aid was working – and how they define “success” – would be even better.

Cara at The Curvature: LGBT Youth Face High Rates of Homelessness and Incarceration

Personal safety nets and support systems are, of course, extremely important. But the way that access to such systems tend to fall along lines of privilege and oppression cannot go ignored in any such discussion.

Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post: U.S. indirectly paying Afghan warlords as part of security contract

The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

Anthony Kuhn at NPR News: Executions In China Under Growing Scrutiny

China’s government is coming under increasing pressure to reduce its use of the death penalty, slowly shifting the country’s legal system away from centuries of authoritarian tradition and toward greater legal protection for individual rights.

25 June, 2010 – 10:07 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , |

The Time I Fed A Giraffe

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the time I fed a giraffe.

This requires a backstory. I have, among the many random connections I have made in life, a passing acquaintance with a veterinarian who works at the San Francisco Zoo. At one time in my life, I actually wanted to be a vet, and working as a zoo vet was what I was most especially interested in. I particularly wanted to work with big cats, but honestly, I wasn’t terribly picky. I later learned that being a veterinarian requires math and rather a lot of time in school, and that vet school is highly competitive, so I shelved that dream, since if there’s one thing I do not do well, it is competition.

But I digress. I was telling you about my friend, Zoo Vet. Zoo Vet asked me one day if I would like a behind the scenes tour of the zoo, and I of course said ‘yes.’ Several memories of this particular adventure stick in my head, like feeding the hippos1 and enraging the rhino2 and petting a baby koala3.

But it is feeding the giraffes that I remember most of all. Zoo Vet was telling us about the giraffe breeding, and we were discussing the complexities of anesthesia for giraffes, because evidently they are very sensitive, and then we filled little rubber buckets with giraffe chow, and we walked out into the giraffe yard and stood there.

I felt sort of foolish for a moment, standing there with my rubber bucket, and suddenly a huge head loomed in from behind me, and I realised that there were giraffes! Right there! That I had not noticed! The giraffe turned her head to look at me in an inquiring sort of way, and I was, well, awestruck is the only word. I had never been this close to a giraffe in my life. Her face was inches away from mine. She had thick, luscious eyelashes, and little velvety horns, and a nose that looked extremely soft.

The head of a giraffe, shot against a blue sky.

(Photo by Flickr user law_keven, Creative Commons License.)

We gazed into each others’ eyes for a moment, and Zoo Vet said: ‘You know, you can pet her if you want.’

And I did, and her nose was so very soft and velvety. It was like nothing I have felt before or since. It is the feeling that you conjure up in your mind when people use words like ‘soft as a baby’s bottom.’ It was so very delightful, and she waggled her lips against my fingers and they were so very warm and also a little bit rubbery and she whiffled against my palm and it was warm and humid and it tickled, just a little bit.

She looked up at me expectantly, and Zoo Vet explained that she wanted a treat, and I could hold the bucket up for her, or see if she would take food from my hand. I put a treat in my hand, and she stuck out her long, purple tongue and wrapped it around the treat and then thoughtfully brought it back to her mouth and chewed, and then swallowed and looked at me again.

I was entranced. I hung out with the giraffe for at least an hour.

I thought that it was sad that she was living in a zoo, instead of being allowed to do giraffe-like things somewhere out in the wild, that she spent much of her day being gawked at by people. And I also felt very lucky and special for being able to touch her, to put ‘giraffe’ into my muscle and sense memory, to turn the giraffe from an abstract concept into a real, living thing. Many of us have seen pictures of giraffes or seen them in zoos, and some of us have seen them in the wild, but fewer of us have fed a giraffe treats while touching her oh so very soft horns and watching her ears flick around as we talk to her. Fewer of us have traced those little giraffe markings, have stood next to a giraffe and smelled that dusky haysweet scent that is like horse but not, have been startled by the sudden appearance of a head zooming in from above to investigate the situation on the ground.

Giraffes in general are, for the most part, deemed pretty low risk in terms of endangerment. However, there are some unique subspecies that are in danger of being lost. Ever since I interacted with the giraffe at the San Francisco Zoo, giraffe conservation has had a more personal meaning for me. The time I fed a giraffe changed my life, because, really, how can you look into those serious eyes with their framing of luxurious lashes that any film star would be jealous of and not think that this is one of the most amazing animals in the world?

  1. They open up their mouths wider than one would think possible and you hurl fresh vegetables in and you must be careful because sometimes they climb the walls of the enclosure with their teeth. Yes, you read that right. ↩
  2. For some reason, the zoo’s rhino really did not like me. Apparently the rhino is usually fairly mellow, but something about me in particular evoked high levels of ire. We didn’t actually go into the rhino enclosure, but we did go around into the back, and the rhino spent the whole time being extremely angry that I was there. ↩
  3. This was when I learned that koalas are, in fact, extremely vicious. Zoo Vet held the mother with epic leather gloves along the lines of those you might expect someone to wear for bear wrestling. The baby was, however, very, very soft. ↩
24 June, 2010 – 10:23 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in adventures, animals, environmental issues, San Francisco | Tagged , |

Holey Peas

Cienna Madrid at The Stranger: The Insufferable Neighborhood Activists

Some people at City Hall have dubbed the group’s members, who have opposed lots of city improvements lately, “the usual suspects.” As for the current town-house fight, the group claims that the city hasn’t studied the issue enough.

Michelle Chen at RaceWire: Slave Trade Still Part of US Labor Market

The legacy of slavery in America is inextricably bound with the history of the nation. And the State Department has finally acknowledged that, even today, people continue to be bought and sold as property.

Slash Oil: ‘Slash Oil’ Event June 26th, 10 a.m., Ocean Beach

On Saturday morning, June 26, approximately two thousand people will gather at 10 a.m. on Ocean Beach in San Francisco for a peaceful exercise in democracy and community.

Rong-Gong Lin II at the Los Angeles Times: County-USC’s emergency room deemed ‘dangerously overcrowded’

“I think we’re having a real problem. This is a serious situation,” said Molina, whose district includes County-USC, just east of downtown in Boyle Heights.

Laura Sydell at NPR News: FCC Eyes Broadband For Indian Reservations

Only 63 percent of all Americans have high-speed Internet connections. That’s low compared with other countries.

24 June, 2010 – 10:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Why, Thank You! You’re Too Kind

I’ve been mulling over Plumcake’s post about accepting compliments since she wrote it way back in April.

One of the things about being read as a woman is that I internalise a lot of behaviours that society expects of women. This includes some things I really don’t like, one of which is constantly denigrating myself and my accomplishments. Nowhere does this become more apparent than when someone compliments me on something I’ve done. My default response to a compliment is to try and minimise my achievement as much as possible, to make myself small and unimportant, because this is what I have been taught to do.

As Plumcake pointed out, this is an insult to the complimenter in addition to yourself. If someone speaks highly of you or something you have done and you try to downplay it, it really does suggest that you think this person has questionable judgment or taste. Or that this person isn’t capable of forming an opinion or independent thought. Since a big part of feminist work, for me, is respecting the personhood of my fellow humans and everyone’s ability to think independently and draw ou own conclusions, it’s important for me to accept compliments with grace. To say ‘yes, you are a person, and you have formed an opinion, and I value it, not just because I like to be complimented, but because it is your opinion.’

To say otherwise, to reject a compliment, to say ‘oh no, you’re wrong,’ is telling another human being that I know better than ou. That what I think is more important. That I know what ou is really thinking. It’s exactly like saying ‘oh no, you don’t like that, you like chocolate’ to a person who has clearly stated ‘I would like a bowl of vanilla ice cream, please.’ It’s insulting, in short.

After I read her post, I started becoming a lot more aware of how I handled compliments, and I was horrified to see how many interactions went like this:

‘That’s a lovely photograph!’

‘Oh, I really hate it, I think the composition is dreadful, it’s really not my best work.’

Or this:

‘I really liked your piece on [subject]!’

‘That piece is so unpolished! I just dashed it off in 10 minutes, it’s so embarrassing how much people seem to like it!’

Or this:

‘You are looking very lovely today.’

‘Oh, I just slapped on some pants so I could run to the post office.’

Even as I started recognising what I was doing and trying to stop, it continued. And then, finally, one day someone gave me a compliment and I said ‘Thanks! I like it too!’ And that seemed to break the barrier; since then, I’ve been much better (but by no means perfect) about graciously accepting compliments. And I’ve noticed that this seems to make some people uneasy; when someone gets a compliment and acknowledges it and doesn’t try to undermine the thing being complimented, it starts to be read as self assurance and cockiness, and I find this, well, fascinating, for lack of a better word.

Because the social rule is that we are supposed to gracefully accept compliments, but the unspoken rule, and what we are trained to do, is that we should reject compliments, preferably in a way that downplays our abilities and accomplishments. This is not the first time I have tangled with conflicting rules of social etiquette and it will probably not be the last. We live in a society where we are said to do one thing and taught to do another and woe betide the person who questions this, or who accepts what we are told to do at face value and ignores social conditioning.

I think that there are a couple of things going on when people can’t just accept compliments. One is the lesson that you can’t take pride in your work. This is trained into people who are presumed female from a very early age. Even suitably ‘womanly’ accomplishments should be underplayed as much as possible, lest you be viewed a braggart. It’s not nice to take pride in your work.

It starts to feed into imposter syndrome. Someone complimenting you feels fake, it feels awkward to be told that, yes, you are actually awesome, and so you need to find a way to distance yourself from your work. To make it a fluke, rather than something you worked hard on/for and do in fact deserve credit for. Because to say ‘why thank you, I am very proud of this as well and it’s nice to hear that from you’ is to recognise your own work and to give yourself credit for it. Is to defy social conditioning.

Another is that we are expected to not take up space. Doing something you are proud of is taking up space. And we are also supposed to be effortless; being complimented on your outfit is an acknowledgment of the effort you put into it, and we can’t have that. Being told that someone likes your writing suggests that writing is work that requires actual time, energy, and effort. We wouldn’t want that. Because that would be to admit that accomplishing things takes work. And that we deserve to take up space. Not just a little bit of space, not just sometimes: we are just as deserving of space as everyone else at all times and that includes the space to be rightfully proud of what we do.

One doesn’t need to go overboard in accepting compliments. A simple ‘thank you’ suffices. And what a difference it has made in my view of the world. How much more empowered I feel every time I say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments me, and leave it at that. My pride in my work needs no justification, nor undercutting with refutations of compliments.

And neither does yours. Go ahead. Say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments you. It feels good.

23 June, 2010 – 10:36 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in commentary | Tagged , , |

Teal Stakes

Dennis Myers at News Review: GOP Light

Democrats like to talk about how their party was founded by Thomas Jefferson, which is true. But the party was later founded again, by a more modern leader—William Jennings Bryan.

Andisheh Nouraee at Creative Loafing: I was a teenage Republican

My non-erotic affair with the GOP began in 1980, when I was 7.

Gabriella Coslovitch at The Age: Art stripped bare

What this regrettable tale highlights is the ongoing difficulty in dealing with art fraud in Australia. It’s one of the easiest crimes to get away with, says conservator and forensic expert Robyn Sloggett.

Alda at The Iceland Weather Report: ABC on Iceland, WikiLeaks and the disappearance of Julian Assange

I must say I was slightly taken aback about the way they lumped together WikiLeaks, the IMMI legislation, and the Icelandic parliament. To me, it could easily be construed as though the Icelandic parliament is hiding Julian and plans to offer protection to anyone who leaks more stuff about the US army.

Tera at Sweet Perdition: The Right Kind

The only thing you or I or anyone else can do is stop chopping people up into pieces, into kinds. And when we are the right kind of person, we can recognize our luck-our privilege-for what it is.

23 June, 2010 – 10:00 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

At the Pool

It is the summer of my 11th year.

I am on the border between Spain and Portugal, and it is hot. It was hot all the way across Spain, and it’s hotter here, it feels like I am going to melt. I am not accustomed to heat of this level, coming from a temperate climate. Never have I wished more ardently for a sea breeze. I am guzzling water determinedly and it pours right off of me in the form of sweat. Thus, when we pass the pool, I am shrill and insistent in my demands that we stop so that I can take a swim. I imagine diving into cool water, I imagine the relief that will come with being entirely submerged.

We stop and pay the entry fee and root around in our bags for swimming clothes. Prior to puberty, my body was lean and clean, gender indiscriminate with shorts on. People referred to me as a boy, then, even with the long hair pulled back in a ponytail. I don’t know if it was the planes of my face or the way that I carried myself, but I was usually read as male and here at the pool, walking along the tile to the steps, it is clear that people think I am a little boy, perhaps not least because all I have on is shorts. My loathing for traditional swimsuits runs deep.

The shimmering water does indeed beckon and I dive in, porpoise-like, until I feel my head clearing. It is then that I can pay attention to my surroundings, and I realise that the pool has what I can only describe as a diving tower. It goes beyond mere diving boards. There are boards at multiple levels and at varying degrees of springiness and I, of course, decide that I must go to the very top. If I am going to dive, I want to do this right. No half measures.

There is a line of us waiting to dive, inching our way up the ladder and bunching at the back of the platform. We are slick and slippery, water evaporating off us in the heat, chloriney smell hovering around us in the air. I am surrounded by dark hair and dark eyes and people chatting in Portuguese and I am at sea in an alien land at the same time that I feel very much at home and bonded by our love of the water and of adventure.

When it is my turn, I am suddenly frozen with fear. The pool seems tiny and very far away. I wonder if it’s even possible to hit the pool from this height, or if I will drift off course and end up crashing into the tile. A teenaged boy notices my hesitance. He is wearing blue and white striped shorts and his hair is matted back against his skull with water and he smells like bitter oranges.

‘Aqui,’ he says, standing on the platform to show me how to stand. I step forward and he nods, carefully moving my arms into position. He models the movement of knifing into the water and then coming up again, and smiles. I smile back. It is infectious. The water still seems terrifyingly far away but I remind myself that everyone else has jumped before me successfully, and I shake my shoulders and somehow I feel very concentrated and focused in the moment and the sights and sounds and smells fade away and I shift into position and take a deep breath.

I dive, falling through the air like a stone and seeking so far to the bottom of the pool that I think surely I am going to slam into the bottom, but of course, I don’t. Instead, I bob up like a cork and I see the boy at the top of the tower. He waves at me and dives himself, neatly, so cleanly that the water barely splashes. The leaves that have drift onto the surface of the pool flutter for a moment before settling again.

I drift back to the side of the pool to lie on my towel and read a book, occasionally returning to the water when I start getting too hot again, and eventually we pack up and leave, arriving at last in Lisbon, where I have my sea breezes again.

I have never forgotten the boy at the pool. I don’t know why the memory sticks with me. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me at all, a single and very brief incident in a long life. He was a few years older than me, if I recall correctly. I don’t know if it was the day, or the heat and my fatigue, or the boy, or the pool, or what confluence of events it was, but the event is still clear in my mind. Sometimes I see him in my dreams, the boy, saying ‘aqui’ and reaching out to me.

I don’t remember much of Lisbon at all, other than feeling overwhelmed by sights and sounds and people and wanting to retreat into myself and being unable to, resorting instead to lashing out until people leave me alone, let me stay at the house, let me sit in the shade with a book. But I do remember the boy at the pool. I remember his hands on my arms and the smell of bitter oranges and his warm smile and that brief moment of connection with another human being, bound by common love of water and a sunny day at the pool.

22 June, 2010 – 10:45 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in history |

Swelling Gourds

Aqueertheory at Below the Belt: Bluffin’ with our Muffin? – Lady Gaga and the Queer Revolution

Amidst all this fawning, critical voices have barely been heard. This is why I would like to pose a series of questions about Ms. Gaga that will hopefully move the discussion somewhere beyond the realms of sycophancy.

Thad Williamson at Indyweek: The World Cup, global inequality and global community

Mandela spent considerable energy in getting his country selected to host this event, in hopes it would be not just a celebration of South Africa’s incredible transition to a multiracial democracy but also an impetus to further human progress in the country and on the continent.

Tasha Fierce at Red Vinyl Shoes: Why I’m An Angry Black Woman

For whatever the reason, a lot of white people seem to feel that since we elected a black man as our President, everything is A-OK on the race front. It appears that to them, the main goal of the civil rights movement was not to gain equal rights for people of color, or change hearts and minds, but to install a person of color in the highest office of the land.

Lyndsey Teter at The Other Paper: Pissed off at BP?

Bill Englefield hopes this friendly reminder will educate potential boycotters that it’s not BP who suffers when you bypass his station for the Speedway across the street. It’s him. And his 1,500 regional employees; i.e.—your neighbors.

Missy Schwartz at Shelf Life: ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy: Did Stieg Larsson have a problem with women?

Stieg Larsson considered himself a feminist, and the Millennium Trilogy reflects that philosophy: Those who perpetrate violence against women suffer severe consequences. Well, hey, that’s a message I can get behind. So why am I not pumping my fist in praise of Larsson’s pro-woman opus?

22 June, 2010 – 10:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Seasons Have Changed Again

Summer officially begins today in the United States, it being the longest day of the year. This always seems a little bit unfair to me, like the solstice should be hitting at the height of summer, rather than marking the start, because it’s all downhill from here. The days are only going to get shorter. It will be by bits and pieces and then one day I will look outside the window at 5:00 in the evening and it will be dark and I will wonder where the long days went.

A part of me still thinks that summers should be holidays. That I should be spending the next two months going to the river every day, sitting on the beach, hanging out with friends, eating watermelon. All of these things probably will happen, albeit in very small amounts, but what tends to happen more in the summer is work. I work more because it’s light longer, and thus summers are really just fatiguing. I’d like to say that I’m storing up for the winter or something, but I’m not. Instead, I spend the winter sleeping because I am so tired from the summer.

I’m not quite sure how this ended up happening, how summer turned from the time of year for play to the time of year for work, but it results in a sense of kind of bitterness on the summer solstice. I should be out lighting bonfires, and instead I’m, well, I’m working. Because it’s a Monday, and Mondays are my heavy work schedule days, and we all know that the world will end if I stray from my schedule. Luckily all of my academic friends are working this summer too or I would feel especially irritable that they were out playing while I was slogging away indoors.

The changing of the seasons does seem like a good place to pause and take stock, which seems to be a popular activity on the solstices. A lot has happened in the last year. My circle of acquaintances has exploded, that’s for sure. I’ve met a lot of lovely people (and even started a website with some of them) and my life has been greatly enriched by all the wonderful people I am interacting with. I’ve had Friends In the Internet for a very long time, thanks to belonging to some very well-established Internet communities, but my number of online friends has really exploded in the last year.

I think there’s a lot of stigma about online friendships. An idea that they are somehow lesser or that people who communicate primarily online, as I do, are suspect in some way. I’ve never really understood this; a friend is a friend, after all, and for a lot of people, the Internet is the only way to communicate. I like that I can find common ground with people all over the world, that I can learn things from numerous individuals with very different lived experiences from my own, that I can find people to connect with. And, since I tend to isolate myself in the outside world, the Internet provides a really valuable conduit for interaction with other people.

My career seems to be at kind of a stagnant point right now, and I think that’s because I am so exhausted. I can’t really remember a time that I wasn’t exhausted, although I know that this time existed. I’m working rather a lot for people who pay me and the unpaid work I do for this ain’t livin’ and FWD/Forward eats up most of my free time. This work is important, but I think I need to work more in the next year on finding a better balance before it eats me alive, because I’m not sure how sustainable this level of work is, especially since it means that I have very little time for other projects that I would like to work on as well.

I’ve done a lot of pitching in the last few months, which any writer can tell you is a frustrating process. There are the polite letters of rejection, of course, but worse, I think, are the long silences. The people who don’t even bother to write back with two lines saying ‘Thanks, this isn’t really a good fit for us. Good luck in your endeavors.’ It seems to be increasingly common to just not respond to pitches at all, and that’s been a real source of frustration to me because I feel that it’s really unprofessional. And because it leaves me hanging; a few times I have assumed that the long silence means a no go, and then I get a ‘can you have the piece ready in 24 hours’ and I have to scramble.

It’s a lot of work, making your way as a freelancer, and I think a lot of people don’t realise how much work is involved and how unrewarding a lot of it is. It sounds like a terrific idea, working at home and writing, but the actual execution isn’t nearly so rosy. You spend an alarming amount of time hustling. Making connections that may or  may not pan out. Writing pieces that may never be accepted for publication anywhere, ever. Procrastinating by alphabetising the spice rack. Hence, I laugh when people tell me I’m a writer and they say ‘that must be nice’ or ‘you must enjoy that’ because both of these ideas are pretty alien to me at this point. It’s work. There are things about it I love and there are things about it that I cannot stand.

Spending the longest day of the year inside trying to finish a piece for deadline instead of outside celebrating the turn of the seasons and perhaps spending time with people I like isn’t really what I thought I would be doing with myself when I grew up, I tell you what.

21 June, 2010 – 10:58 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reflections | Tagged , |

Cranky Storks

Amanda Hess at The Sexist: Barrier Method: How a 42-Inch Fence Is Threatening Our Nation’s Unborn

Landscaping changes rarely prompt civil disobedience. Mahoney, a Presbyterian minister and longtime anti-abortion activist, is more concerned with what lies beyond the fence: a grassy, 40-foot-long entryway with a paved center walk that leads to the clinic, where the services include abortions.

Brentin Mock at Colorlines: Louisiana Cops Probe Oil Spill Workers for Immigrant Gangsters

“If St. Bernard’s government officials would actually spend time on public policy that was in line with real people’s priorities, then they would be cleaning up the oil in the sea in the Gulf of Mexico instead of scapegoating immigrants in their own community,” says Saket Soni, executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.

Yasha Levine at New York Press: The Making of Manhattan’s Elite Welfare Farmers

Well, here is the perfect welfare program for the bailout queens to show off their fiscally conservative chops: Let’s see them cut federal farm subsidies, which funnel billions of dollars to the richest Americans, including notables like Ted Turner, David Letterman, Scottie Pippen, Paris Hilton’s grandpa, Charles Schwab, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and just about every single one of Sam Walton’s degenerate heirs.

Marianne at The Rotund: Friday Fats; Female Genital Mutilation STILL Not Okay

Can we really say, with any degree of confidence, that you can look at a clit on a 6-yr-old girl and believe nothing about her genitals is going to develop and change over time so it is a good idea to do permanent, life-altering surgery that will have a permanent impact on her sexual function?

Kyla Pasha at Global Comment: Ahmadi killings – we are all guilty

The rest of us wax hysterical at “Draw Muhammad Day” contests and insist that the Lahore High Court ban Facebook until the abomination is ended.

21 June, 2010 – 10:15 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Environmental Issues: Drugs in the Water

I recently finished a course of liquid antibiotics and I was about to rinse out the medication container and drop it in the recycling when I realised that doing so would contribute to a serious environmental problem: Medical waste in the water, air, and soil. A number of studies in recent years have identified traces of pharmaceuticals in water supplies and have documented a variety of environmental consequences as a result.

There are a number of paths pharmaceuticals take to end up in the water. One is the path my medication almost went down; people dispose of unused medications by flushing them or pouring them down the sink. This may be done to avoid poisonings, to get rid of clutter, to dispose of expired medications, or for other reasons. It seems like a logical step to take; people are advised not to keep old medications sitting around the house, and it seems counterintuitive to just throw them away.

Metabolites of pharmaceuticals expressed in urine, feces, and sweat also end up in the air, water, and soil. In some cases, people may express active ingredients due to the fact that the body fails to completely metabolize medications and in other instances, they secrete chemicals formed through metabolic processes in the body. Sometimes this can be extremely dangerous. People on certain types of radiation therapy, for example, are actually radioactive and have to observe special precautions until the medications are cleared from their bodies.

Initially, when medications were identified in the water supply, scientists took a wait and see approach. It doesn’t make sense to get concerned about a situation until evidence to support a cause for concern is presented, after all. As it turns out, there was a lot to be concerned about. Numerous anomalies have been identified in fish exposed to compounds like antidepressants and estrogens. In addition to fish, other microorganisms and plants near polluted water have also developed abnormalities. While polluted water may not pose a threat to humans directly, it certainly harms animals.

It also contributes to the development of antibiotic resistance. That antibiotic I almost gleefully poured down the drain happens to be a very aggressive broad spectrum antibiotic, prescribed because, in this case, my infection was not responding to other antibiotics. Introducing that antibiotic to the water supply would have exposed some bacteria to it, some of those bacteria could have had resistance, and those bacteria could have bred, creating a small pocket of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Multiply that by millions of households dumping antibiotics down the drain and what you end up with is infections which do not respond to antibiotic therapy. Like the infection I spent hundreds of dollars treating before we found an antibiotic which worked.

Antibiotic resistance isn’t just an expensive pain in the ass1. It also poses a serious risk to people (and animals) with compromised immune systems. The search for an antibiotic which will work may take too long, giving the bacteria a chance to take hold. Sometimes, bacteria kill. People are regularly reminded to finish their antibiotics to address antibiotic resistance, but they are not often reminded to dispose of antibiotics responsibly.

Furthermore, pharmaceuticals in the water are causing some problems at water treatment plants. Facilities which process wastewater need to use new filtering techniques to get pharmaceuticals out so that they are not introduced to the natural environment through release of treated water. This adds to the cost of water processing significantly as plants are forced to upgrade or risk not treating water fully and releasing medications into the environment. And, of course, medications floating in the water at such plants can disturb the balance of beneficial flora and fauna used in wastewater treatment, literally sickening a wastewater plant as hardier organisms start to multiply and fragile ones die off. In plants which use biological treatment methods (a lot, when you consider plants which use microorganisms during at least one stage of water treatment), meds in the water are a big problem.

So, great, drugs in the water are bad, what are you supposed to do about it?

One option which is frequently recommended for home disposal is the trash. Medication labels should be removed or scratched out and the bottles securely closed and wrapped in tape before dropping them in the garbage, preferably with unpleasant materials like cat litter to dissuade people who might be exploring the garbage from fishing the medications out. However, trashing poses two problems. The first is that it is not a safe method to dispose of certain medications, and sometimes people aren’t provided with notice about a safe way to dispose of drugs; it’s important to ask a pharmacist about the recommended disposal method. The second is that even if medications can be safely trashed, they can still leach in the landfill. It might take a while, but if a container cracks open or is damaged and the landfill is not well lined, that medication can end up exactly where you didn’t want it: in the water.

Another option is to save up  medications and take them back. Numerous communities have hazardous waste pickup which includes pickup of medications and other medical waste like sharps containers and some hospitals accept expired and unused medications for disposal. When preparing medications for this type of disposal, people should remove or obscure the labels to get rid of identifying information, wrap up the containers in tape to tightly seal them, and store them in a secure place. When hazardous waste pickup is in the area, the medications can be taken to a drop off point.

It’s also sometimes possible to mail in hazardous waste in envelopes sent out by the disposal company. It can be worth calling to see if that’s an option. Another thing to consider is asking neighbors if they want to take turns handling hazardous waste for the neighborhood; if pickup happens once a month and people take turns delivering neighborhood waste to the dropoff, disposing of hazardous waste responsibly won’t be such a burden. Before doing this, however, it is a good idea to ask if there are limits on individual dropoffs; someone with a car load of materials may be refused, even if that person is doing the neighbors a favour!

  1. Literally, in my case, I had a GI infection with some rather graphic symptoms. ↩
20 June, 2010 – 10:27 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues, health | Tagged , , , |