Music festivals and drugs: Wastewater analysis.

Drug consumption in individual cities, regions, and at various music events and festivals across the EU has generally been monitored via questionnaires, patients' medical data, and police reports. However, an overview of drug consumption obtained from these methods can be negatively affected by various subjective factors. We aimed to investigate an association between levels of target drugs in wastewater, music genres, and festival courses. The occurrence of illicit drugs, their metabolites, and psychoactive compounds was investigated in the influent of six wastewater treatment plants in the Czech and Slovak Republic during seven large-scale music festivals from different music genres: metal, rock, pop, country and folk, ethnic, multi-genre, dance, and trance. The total number of participants included >130,000 active festival attendees. The association between music genre and illicit drug and/or psychoactive pharmaceutical consumptions is discussed on the basis of the results obtained through wastewater analyses. The observed trend was similar to worldwide published data with a specific local phenomenon of methamphetamine prevalence that did not significantly change between music events. Increased specific loads of cocaine (measured as its metabolite benzoylecgonine) and Ecstasy, along with some cannabis, were mainly observed during pop/rock and dance music festivals. However, there was no significant increase observed in the specific loads of all monitored psychoactive pharmaceuticals. This study demonstrates that the abuse of some illicit drugs is closely associated with specific music preferences.

Evaluation of different smoking habits during music festivals through wastewater analysis.

Wastewater analysis is a powerful method that can provide useful information about the abuse of legal and illicit drugs. The aim of our study was to determine nicotine consumption during four different music festivals and to find a connection between smoking and preferences for specific music styles using wastewater analysis. The amount of the nicotine metabolite cotinine was monitored in wastewater at the influent of three waste water treatment plants WWTPs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where the festivals took place. Urinary bio-markers of nicotine utilization were analyzed by LC-HRMS. More than 80,000 festival participants were monitored during our study from June to September 2014. A significant increase of nicotine consumption was observed in wastewaters during music festivals. The nicotine ingestion level was back-calculated and expressed as mass of pure drug consumed per day and per 1000 inhabitants for selected cities of both countries. The highest differences between typical levels of cotinine in wastewaters and the levels during music festivals were detected in Piestany: 4 g/L/1000 inhabitants during non-festival days compared to 8 g/L/1000 inhabitants during the Topfest pop-rock festival and 6g/L/1000 inhabitants during the Grape dance festival. No significant increase of the amounts of cotinine in wastewater was recorded for the Country and Folk festivals.