I saw a news article about pharmaceuticals, including Viagra, getting into the water supply. How does this happen? Does it cause environmental problems?Viagra in the drinking water sounds like a fantasy or a joke (or a recipe for a very happy village), but it's not far from reality. Significant traces of prescription drugs have been found in groundwater, rivers, lakes, bays, and coastal waters, including erectile dysfunction drugs, antidepressants and other psychiatric medications, hormones, and other substances like caffeine and nicotine.
How does it get there? Well, what goes in has to come out. When you take a drug and your body can't metabolize all of it, some gets excreted. So, those drugs are getting into the water through wastewater, i.e. sewage. Even treated sewage can still have those chemicals in it. Yeah, it's not nice to think about. Drugs can also leach into groundwater if they are thrown away and disposed of in a landfill.
The good news is that (hopefully) not a lot of that is getting into the drinking water supply, but that depends on where you live and what your water source is. And they're still out in the environment, where you can be exposed to them, and they can impact wildlife. The full and longterm effects aren't known, because environmental agencies have just recently started monitoring pharmaceutical pollution.
For the average Viagra user, there's not a lot you can do to prevent this from happening. Maybe don't take a higher dose of Viagra than required, to avoid excreting the excess amount. In the (unlikely) event that you have some unneeded or expired Viagra that you need to dispose of, don't throw it in the trash or flush it down the toilet. Take it to a pharmacy, medical facility, or police station where they accept prescription drugs for disposal. This goes for any type of drug, prescription or over the counter, that you might need to get rid of.
Anyway, Viagra probably isn't one of the drugs that would have the greatest impact. The ones that are really causing problems are hormones - estrogen and phytoestrogens. They can disrupt the normal development and reproduction of wildlife, and exposure to excess estrogens can have serious health consequences for humans, including...impotence in men.
