Mellow fish

You don't have to be stupid to fall victim to conspiracy theories.  Many of my fellow college students, living in boys' dorms, spoke darkly of rumors that the university added saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to our dorm meals -- supposedly a sure-fire means to suppress distracting hormonal urges in 18-22 year old boys.

I doubt that many of us actually believed that the FDA would allow the university to so adulterate our food, but it made a good story.  If the cranky old fogeys who ran the school didn't actually do it, they sure wished they could.

Something analogous now seems to be occurring -- without any obvious criminal intent -- in the Great Lakes.  And the victims -- so far, at least -- aren't sexually crazed boys, but lake fish.

According to the Economist, all those extra, unused Prozac, Zoloft, and Celexa tablets that get flushed down the toilet end up in the lakes, their molecules slipping right through sewage treatment plant filters.  But surely there aren't enough pills being flushed to cause problems?  Well, I don't know.  They go through fish gills, and end up concentrated in their brains.  Concentrations of twenty times that found in the lake water have been detected in fish brains.

Fish react to antidepressants just as we do.  They relax.  "They are less risk-adverse and, it appears, happier.  That seems to make them more likely to be eaten."  (Something for you executives to think about when popping a couple of pills before going to that critical board meeting.)   When the little fishies start zoning out, their resulting demise changes the ecology of the lake.  And not for the better.

The Economist article assures us that we humans are not directly endangered by the fishes' uptake of antidepressants, because we rarely eat fish brains.  Well, maybe.  But you might want to monitor your subjective sense of post-prandial well-being after you next dine on Great Lakes fish.

And, of course, wouldn't it be interesting if those damn Democrats were feeding fish brains in some form to the people of certain states bordering the Great Lakes?  States where voters have shown a tendency to be edgy and upset recently?  Like Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania?

I know nothing.  I allege nothing.  I'm just a humble blogger.  So don't quote me.  But if the powers-that-be have no compunction about feeding saltpeter to innocent boys, why not slip antidepressants to out-of-control Trump voters?

Remember. You read it somewhere on the internet. It must be true.