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.

"This is another synthetic drug that's coming in behind (fentanyl) that is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the fentanyl," DEA special agent in charge Steven Hofer said. "There is a good kind of fentanyl, but those nitazenes, whether they're in counterfeit pills or they are mixed with other recreational illegal drugs. That's when they become dangerous, is the unknown."

During their research in New Orleans, lab technicians collected 28 samples from a wastewater treatment plant estimated to serve around 300,000 people.

The wastewater analysis enabled the lab to quantify seven variants of nitazenes from the New Orleans samples, which had not previously been reported at such high frequency, levels and amounts, said LSU assistant professor Bikram Subedi, co-director of the lab.

However, detecting the drug variants was not easy. Due to the addictive nature of the drug, people typically consume it in very small amounts, making it harder to detect in wastewater, Subedi said.

"So, if we have like 100 or 200 people using that drug, such a small amount diluted into that big water – it's really difficult to detect that," Subedi said. "But during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras, we have detected those compounds more frequently, (which) means there were so many people using those drugs."

Testing indicates nitazenes are usually combined with other substances such as fentanyl and cocaine.

Nitazenes are not the only drugs that have been detected through the lab's high-tech methods.

The wastewater treatment tests can rapidly detect and quantify more than 50 existing and novel drugs present in water samples.

"We can determine how much cocaine was consumed yesterday in the entirety of Baton Rouge," Subedi said in an LSU Blog about how researchers are using wastewater to protect public health.

While these treatments provide for early detection of drugs in a targeted area, the expense of running the tests hinders expanding the studies to other Louisiana cities.

"Our department is in favor of any data that can inform where we can make better interventions and implement prevention strategies, but our city can't afford that testing infrastructure, so we rely on the state to provide that for us," New Orleans Health Department public relations analyst Jimmy Orum said in an email.

He also said the New Orleans department is not currently seeing a growing problem of nitazenes in the city, based on what the city's Overdose Fatality Review panel reports on a daily basis.

The New Orleans DEA does not currently have any investigations into deaths resulting from nitazenes, but it reminds the public to stay vigilant and to never take prescription medication that did not come from a licensed pharmacist and that was prescribed by a physician.

Despite this, the LSU lab is working to expand its research to other cities in the state, including Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

Emilia Lomnicki, an undergraduate student who assisted in the lab's research, presented her research in the Capitol during the opening of the 2026 session in hopes of raising awareness about the benefits of early drug detection through wastewater treatment.

"It will cause more questions in the research community," Lomnicki said, adding that the research will help create processes for drug users to test their substances.

Avery White contributed reporting for this story. It was reported and written with the support of the non-profit Louisiana Collegiate News Collaborative, an LSU-led coalition of eight universities funded by the Henry Luce and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations.