One of the few things left to look forward to is the annual release of data that shows which European city is doing most of its cocaine supply, by scientists who determine such by analyzing the cocaine in various sewers. Usually it’s London, but this year, in an interesting twist, Antwerp is doing all the blow.
The Guardian reports that this year’s hot Euro sewage roundup found 1,042mg of cocaine per 1,000 people per day in the Belgian city, meaning the Antwerpians love to get high! Interestingly enough, though, Londoners had everyone else beat on getting high on the freaking weekdays, though the sewage analyzed was from March, before the Brexit vote, so presumably everyone was feeling a lot looser back then. You can also learn interesting things from science, such as how long it takes for a person to shit out their nose candy:
Weekend averages cover Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, while weekday levels related to the other days of the week. Leon Barron of King’s College, who took part in the research, said this was because of the time it took for users to excrete the metabolites of their drugs.
“If you think about cocaine, the maximum concentration that you will excrete in your urine will take about two hours or so for that to come out,” he said.
“For its metabolites, it’s a bit longer: it’s six hours before they will find their way out of the system, and so there’s a little bit of a lag period for the cocaine because of the metabolism of the drug.
The Guardian reports the cocaine use in England and Wales is on the rise for people who make £50,000 (a little over $63k), which makes sense, and that most of Europe’s cocaine is done in Western Europe as opposed to Eastern Europe. No one really tops the cocaine use in the United States, though—Americans are the world’s largest consumers of cocaine, according to the CIA. So that’s fun and terrible!
Correction: A previous version of this post erroneously called Antwerp the capital of Belgium, when it is in fact Brussels. Jezebel regrets this extremely dumb error!
