While you're out busting ass for a menial paycheck, salmon in Seattle are getting all their drugs for free …

It's an unfair time to be alive. While you're out busting ass trying to collect a menial paycheck to turn around and spend on over-priced party favors from that sketchy dude you went to high school with, Chinook Salmon and other fish in the Puget Sound outside of Seattle, WA are getting tons of drugs for free. 

In estuary waters near the outfalls of sewage-treatment plants, researchers tested for an array of common medicines and personal care products (among other things) to report on the effects waste in the area was having on animal life. Surprisingly high levels of crap was found over the course of the two-year study, including "cocktails of 81 drugs and personal-care products, with levels detected among the highest in the nation," claims Seattle Times.

Of the found chemicals in the water and flesh of fish samples were Prozac, Advil, Benadryl, Lipitor, Flonase, Aleve, Tylenol. Paxil, Valium, Zoloft, Tagamet, OxyContin, Darvon, Nicotine, caffeine and cocaine — amongst others.

While the team isn't worried that all this shit is getting into the city's drinking water (because that's taken from an entirely different source away from a dense population), the findings are of concern because there's no regulation or regular monitoring of wastewater and how it effects the areas it's dumped into, says 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. Even though people don't eat the sculpin or salmon from the area, there's still very little science showing if the contaminants do or do not alter the environment for the natural wildlife (hint: it probably does). 

“You have treatment doing its best to remove these, chemically and biologically, but it’s not just the treatment quality, it’s also the amount that we use day to day and our assumption that it just goes away,” says Betsy Cooper, permit administrator for the county’s Wastewater Treatment Division to Seattle Times. “But not everything goes away.”

Seattle hipster fish have all the fun …

photo: Seattle Times