Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Atlantic salmon exposed to cocaine in Sweden’s Lake Vättern swam nearly twice as far per week as their sober counterparts, according to a study published this week in Current Biology, a journal whose editors have presumably stopped being surprised by anything.
The research, conducted jointly by Griffith University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, involved implanting 105 juvenile salmon with slow-release chemical doses of either cocaine, benzoylecgonine (the metabolite your liver produces after it has had enough of your poor life choices), or nothing, and then tracking them by acoustic telemetry across the 738-square-mile lake for eight weeks. The drugged fish dispersed up to 7.6 miles farther than the control group, which seems reasonable, because I did that once at a college party under similar circumstances, and it was glorious.
Cocaine school at its finest. (kamchatka/depositphotos)
The more surprising finding, researchers said, was that benzoylecgonine had a stronger effect on behavior than actual cocaine. This is the aquatic equivalent of discovering that the guy cleaning up after the party is somehow more wired than the people who threw it.
“Any unnatural change in animal behavior is a concern,” co-author Dr. Marcus Michelangeli of Griffith’s Australian Rivers Institute told the ABC, in the calm voice of a man who has given this quote to six different outlets this week. Michelangeli noted that the concentrations used in the study match those already documented in polluted waterways, meaning the salmon are not participating in an experiment so much as being caught up to speed on it. Not actual speed, that’s a different study.
The cocaine is getting into the lake because people are doing cocaine and then using the bathroom, a two-step process that anyone who went to college since 1970 is likely familiar with. Swedish wastewater effluent has been measured discharging up to 0.5 ounces of benzoylecgonine per day into the environment, which is the approximate yield of a medium-sized music festival. Associate professor Michael Bertram of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences called this “a concrete environmental challenge,” which seems like an understatement.
Researchers emphasized that the findings do not indicate a risk to humans who eat the fish, because the juveniles studied are below the legal catch size and the compounds break down over time. They did not address the risk to the fish themselves, who now travel 7.6 miles farther than necessary on what biologists politely called “dispersion” and what any experienced observer would call “the zoomies”.
The study joins a growing body of research on marine life and recreational pharmaceuticals, including 2024 findings that sharks off the coast of Brazil tested positive for cocaine and 2025 findings that Bahamian sharks were showing trace amounts of caffeine, painkillers, and cocaine in their blood. Lead author Natascha Wosnick told CBS News the caffeine was arguably more alarming than the cocaine, a sentiment that will likely resonate with anyone who has worked in an open office.
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