Hi, I am Paul and I am drunk, watching TruTV.
So I am watching “Stupid Criminals” or some such. A couple of guys are tossing large, say ten-pound bags, of cocaine out of the car. The bags burst like flour bags, coke everywhere.
So I suppose they collected some samples as evidence and then (I guess) called the fire department to flush the coke off the road. Is cocaine dangerous to the environment?
Well it can certainly fuck up any animal life, though the effect should be reversible. It’s both a stimulant and a potent anesthetic. I recall that one of the cocaine-derived anasthetics (lidocaine? benzocaine?) is used for field studies of fish and maybe other animals. Catch a fish, toss it in a bucket full of drugs, and soon it will be anesthetized enough to put on a tag and take samples. And then the fish goes into a bucket of regular water and recovers.
ETA: A lot of our drugs come from plants that make them as pesticides. So you might kill a lot of insect life as well.
Thank you. I suppose the police/fire department would wash the stuff off the road. I also suppose they really ought not to.