A flow of coke

last updated 8 January 2015

Milan

Italians snort up to 80 times more cocaine than was previously thought, New Scientist reported this week. Scientists from the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research sampled the Po, Italy’s largest river, for levels of cocaine residue secreted in human urine. The amounts they found indicated that the 5 million residents of the Po watershed area took at least 40,000 doses of cocaine every day. A dose was estimated to be around five lines. Researchers said the results were all the more startling given that the method used could only underreport, not overreport, cocaine levels.