Don't flush all your drugs down the toilet or pee in streams. You're killing fish!!

All you people who pop pills incessently need to stop flushing your pills down the toilet. You also should buy special tiolets to extract all those drugs you are injesting that just go out your urine. Or at least throw them into the trash where they will go into the land fill and ground water to poison other people. Wait ... that's no good.

It turns out that drugs such as antidepressants (especially Effexor) turn little fish into zombies unable to escape predatores.

They didn't test cannibis on fish but I'm sure that isn't good either.

Fish exposed to antidepressants in the wild

[link to www.earthsky.org]

Antidepressants may benefit people, but they’re not much help to fish. That’s according to Melissa Schultz, an environmental chemist at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. She said that antidepressants and other medications we excrete and flush down the toilet are winding up in rivers, possibly harming wildlife.

Melissa Schultz: We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals affect fish.

Schultz teamed up with biologists who exposed a group of farm-raised minnows to trace levels of antidepressants — in particular, to a drug known as Effexor — and then analyzed the results.

Melissa Schultz: At low levels, the levels we’re seeing in the environment, it can affect the young fish so they can’t respond as fast to stimuli. What that can translate to in the environment is perhaps a predator could come upon them and they’re not going to be able to react as fast and basically they’re going to end up being someone’s lunch.

Schultz thinks we can prevent this problem where it starts: in our toilets.

Melissa Schultz: Some ideas I’ve heard tossed around, which may seem kind of crazy, but ten years from now will be commonplace is to actually treat the waste in the toilet. It sounds kind of gross, but if you know you’re taking certain pharmaceuticals, they can actually be removed — you might have some sort of filter in your toilet so that they’re removed before that water even goes to the waste water treatment plant.

In the meantime, people can help preserve water quality by throwing unused medications in the trash, instead of flushing them.