Just when you thought we had enough to worry about, we get cocaine sharks?

This is your shark.

This is your shark on drugs.

In what is easily the most terrifying news story of the week, authorities reported that today’s shark is ingesting more than mackerel and surfers.

“In a study published last week, researchers tested 13 sharks off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and found that all had traces of cocaine in their liver and muscle tissues,” reported The New York Times. “The levels of cocaine found in these sharks were reported to be as much as 100 times higher than in previously observed marine life.”

I don’t know how you test a shark for cocaine — maybe you count the ones who show up wearing gold chains and leisure suits — but I do know that it’s a job I want no part of.

Imagine when you walk into the lab on a Monday morning and take a look at the task board. All the other scientists are looking for a cure for cancer or studying the long-term effects of forever chemicals, and you’ve got to go out and give a field sobriety test to a creature with teeth the size of parsnips.

“We were actually dumbfounded,” Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a co-author of the study and a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, told the Times. “We were excited in a bad way, but it’s a novel report. It’s the first time this data has ever been found for any top predator.”

It might be because it’s the first time anyone has looked. Bears might be mainlining PCP for all we know, but who’s going to get close enough for a swab?

There are multiple theories about how cocaine is entering the sharks’ systems. One is that cocaine traffickers running from the police have been known to dump their product in the ocean in hopes of destroying the evidence. But it seems more probable that it’s entering the rivers and ocean through wastewater treatment plants that are not particularly effective at scrubbing drugs from sewage.

It has become something of a parlor trick down at the sewer plant (speaking of jobs I don’t want) to make broad generalizations about communities based on their waste. They could, for example, tell how prevalent COVID-19 was in a city based on its concentrations in the sewage.

Here’s what I want to know: Who figured that out? It’s like the first guy to eat an oyster — somebody reached in for a handful of yuk, put it under a microscope and said “Hey, Butch, lookie here” as everyone else ran gagging from the breakroom.

Probably this most recent study said less about the sharks than it did about the people of Rio de Janeiro. Not that we didn’t already know it was a partying kind of town, but yikes. You would think that, literally, peeing into an ocean to the point where it would make coke-heads out of hammerheads would be a heavy lift, but apparently not so.

What the story failed to say was how the drug might affect shark behavior. It would be an interesting turn of events at the beach if it were the shark that was paranoid: “Run everybody, run, there’s a PERSON in the water!”

And for swimmers, a shark’s loss of appetite would be a net win, I’d think.

Unfortunately though, it doesn’t sound like sharks will start listening to the Bee Gees and spending $3,000 on a purse. “It’s very important to stress that I’m 100% sure that the concentrations they found are super low,” said Jo?o Matias, a scientific analyst at the European Union Drugs Agency.

Just like a scientist. Get us all terrified of some aspect of nature before telling us it’s no big deal.

So the sharks don’t have to sign up for rehab just yet.

Weary of political upheaval and partisan sniping? Tim has the answer: Football. Now.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Researchers find traces of cocaine in sharks off Rio de Janeiro