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Fairfax County, Virginia, has embarked on a bizarre program to test its wastewater for cocaine under a pilot program requested by the Office of National Drug Control Policy -- the drug czar's office -- the Washington Post reported Monday. The Bush administration is seeking to broaden the government's knowledge about illegal drug use, the drug czar's office said.

"We think it will be very, very useful," drug czar John Walters' special assistant David Murray told the Post. While it is premature to suggest that levels of metabolized cocaine in sewage would offer better measures of consumption than traditional surveys, the idea "certainly has that potential," Murray said.

The drug czar's office is picking up on research last year in Italy, where scientists in Milan tested the waters of the Po River and concluded that the 1.4 million young adults in the river basin were snorting some 40,000 lines a day, more than twice the existing estimate. According to US drug surveys, about 25,000 Fairfax County residents used cocaine in the past year. If the wastewater testing suggests much higher consumption levels, drug fighters could use those figures to argue for heightened effort -- and funding.

If the drug czar's office was gung-ho to drug test Virginia sewage, Fairfax County officials were bemused. "It's a very strange request," Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald Connolly (D) told the Post. "We're ready to do anything and everything we can do to eliminate illicit drug use. But I'd want to know a lot more about what this will actually lead to."

The Post also talked to Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, who found the idea sort of silly. "It can't hurt to check," he said. "I'm skeptical that it can be a useful gauge for policy analysis."

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