Published: May 5, 2026
By: Kylah Babin, LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE – After the discovery of new street-drug variants being used in New Orleans during Super Bowl LIX and Mardi Gras in 2025, an LSU lab is seeking to expand the use of wastewater treatment methods to help identify drug-use patterns across Louisiana.
The LSU Environmental Chemistry Lab is one of the few labs in the country that uses a method of wastewater analysis that allows samples to be run through an instrument so that the drug can be broken down into detectable compounds.
“It provides an early detection,” said Ramesh Sapkota, a graduate student who assisted with the research that centered on New Orleans wastewater during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.
Sapkota added that these scientific techniques would help public health officials and immunity services respond sooner to drug issues in an area.
Last year, the lab discovered seven new deadly variants of nitazenes in New Orleans. Nitazenes are manmade drugs and are highly addictive, even more so than other opioids such as morphine and fentanyl. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some of these nitazenes can be 50 times more potent than fentanyl and 1,000 times more potent than morphine.
Read more at American Press.
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 
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