‘Dump it down the drain’: How contaminants from prescription-drug factories pollute waterways

A cacophony of machines, some as big as a dump truck, mix pharmaceutical ingredients, press them into tablets, and fill capsules at a West Virginia factory owned by generic-drug giant Mylan. By the end of each run, the walls, ceilings, floors, and nearly every nook and cranny of the intricate equipment were caked in powdery drug residues, say three former Mylan employees.

No matter how much the machines and floors were swept and vacuumed and wiped down, “there was always powder left on the machines and walls,” said one employee who worked in packaging and other manufacturing roles for nearly five years until being laid off last year. “You see the powder everywhere.”

It was standard practice, the former workers said, to then hose down some of the rooms and machines for up to eight hours and then spray them with alcohol to clear the remaining drug residues, and the wastewater would flow down a drain in the center of each room.

“You just go dump it down the drain,” said the employee who was laid off in 2018. “It always bothered me pouring pharmaceuticals down the drain,” said another former employee who worked in quality control for nearly 10 years. Both requested anonymity because they say they signed nondisclosure agreements.

The drug-tainted wastewater streamed through underground pipes to a municipal treatment plant, but some of the medicine likely passed through unhindered and out to the Monongahela River. Typically, wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to remove pharmaceuticals, so when scientists from the United States Geological Survey tested effluent from the Morgantown, W.Va., plant several years ago, along with the discharges from six other treatment plants, it detected very high levels of some drugs. Downstream from the Morgantown plant, an anti-seizure medication was measured at nearly 90 times the amount considered safe for wildlife.

“The drug levels are insanely high. Locally those concentrations would no doubt have an effect on wildlife,” said Tomas Brodin, an expert on the ecological impact of drug pollution who teaches at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå, of the USGS test results.

Over the past decade, cocktails of drugs from opioids to antidepressants have been showing up in rivers all over the U.S. Studies have detected these chemicals in the bodies of fish