Drug contamination spreads from streets to sea life as dolphins test positive for fentanyl

Some bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have human-made pharmaceuticals including fentanyl in their systems, according to a study published in the journal iScience.

The study took 89 blubber samples, 83 from living dolphins and six from dead ones.

The samples from the live dolphins were taken using a dart shot from a crossbow that bounces back into the ocean and takes a piece of tissue less than 10 mm in diameter with it, according to the Corpus Christi Caller Times.

Fentanyl, an opioid 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, was found in samples from 18 living dolphins and all six dead dolphins.

The muscle relaxant carisoprodol also was found in five of the blubber samples, while meprobamate, a sedative used to treat anxiety disorders, was found in one.

The researchers are not sure whether the levels of fentanyl that the dolphins are exposed to is unsafe for them or for people.

“It was very, very low levels detected, but nobody knows what levels would be deadly to a dolphin,” Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi professor Dara Orbach, one of the study’s authors, told the Caller Times.

The drugs reach the dolphins via contamination of the water in which they live.

“The transfer of human pharmaceuticals into aquatic environments often occur through insufficient treatment of wastewater effluent and untreated discharge from pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Conventional treatment methods implemented by wastewater treatment plants have pharmaceutical removal efficiencies ranging from 23-54%,” the study’s authors wrote last month.

Ms. Orbach said in a release from TAMU-CC Wednesday that the researchers “did find one dead dolphin in Baffin Bay in South Texas within one year of the largest liquid fentanyl drug bust in U.S. history in the adjacent [Nueces County].”

In 2022, a traffic stop in Robstown, Texas, led to the discovery of three gallons of liquid fentanyl in a gas tank, which is almost 4 million doses, the Nueces County District Attorney’s Office told Corpus Christi, Texas, NBC affiliate KRIS-TV.