USA - Yes, blame it on the water, Mr. Spitzer

Yes, blame it on the water, Mr. Spitzer
Clive McFarlane
cmcfarlane@telegram.com
T&G STAFF
They told us two days ago that the water supplies of many cities and towns in the country were veritable pharmacies, and that this has come about in part because people were flushing unused prescriptions down the drain.
Antibiotics, antidepressants, birth control pills, sex hormones, seizure medications, cancer treatments, painkillers, tranquilizers and cholesterol-lowering compounds are among the drugs found in water supplies.
Well, we knew a lot of people were doing a lot of drugs, but what we didn’t know was that we had lost the ability to “just say no.”
In San Francisco and New York, for example, estrogen is one of the drugs found in those cities’ water supply.
As we know, estrogen, the primary female hormone, is not something a man would want to consume every day.

And it is a bit disconcerting to learn that you have no more control over your life than the male flounders in New York City’s Jamaica Bay, which have become feminized because of the high levels of the female hormone estrone or other estrogenic chemicals discovered in the waterway. What do we do now?
Don’t drink the water?
Well, we can’t live without water and we can’t live without our drugs. Sure, some will offer solutions, such as forcing homeowners to install water contamination prevention gadgets in their homes, similar to the grease traps forced on Worcester restaurant owners. But there is really not much we can do, at least not in the short term. This is one of those man-made predicaments that offer no way out. We have to keep drinking the water. Of course, it is a tremendous relief that I am living in Worcester, where officials have declared the city’s water supply “clean.”
I know the city is not testing its water supply for any of the drugs found elsewhere in the nation, but I am quite confident that a city that won’t put fluoride in its water supply would never allow sex hormones, painkillers and the like.
So, it was with complete confidence that I woke up yesterday, filled my coffee pot with city water, brewed my first cup of joe and sipped it contentedly as I thought about the poor souls who were having their morning coffee in San Francisco and New York.
Of course, there is a certain clarity to things now that we know about the type of drugs that are in some of our water supplies. Prior to this knowledge, we would have been totally dumbfounded by the revelation that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was spending thousands of dollars on call girls.
How could a man, who as a district attorney and as the attorney general of New York, relentlessly pursued and busted up prostitution rings live a double life as a frequent john of high-priced hookers?
In the past we would explain this contradiction by noting that Mr. Spitzer is the typical male — that he was thinking with something other than what was between his ears. But could his problems be explained by his unwitting consumption of the drugs in the New York water supply?

A case could be made that the estrogen in the water caused Mr. Spitzer to seek affirmation of his manhood through the use of a prostitute. Any pangs of anxiety and fear he might have had in cheating on his wife and duping the public didn’t have a chance to take root.
The atenolol in the water, a drug that causes a rapid fall in one’s blood pressure, and the diazepam and carisoprodol, tranquilizers used in the treatment of anxiety and tension and as a sedative and muscle relaxant, made him a cool and calculated operator.
We could also say he was in a zombie state, high on the ibuprofen, acetaminophen, codeine, caffeine and nicotine in the water, when, accompanied by his wife, he held a bizarre press conference in which he said he would find time to make good with his family.
Oh, why didn’t his wife take him out when the story broke? Why did she accompany him to the press conference?
There is no deep psychological explanation. She had no choice. She drank the water, too.